


5 Times Malik was Called and 1 Time Altair Was

by Cards_Slash



Series: Sass Verse [9]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 15:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11649504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: The children never wanted to have to call Malik when they messed up but one way or another, it always seemed like he was the one they had to call.





	1. Kidnapping for a Cause

**Author's Note:**

> i had a rough week or two; so I wrote this universe.

Ms. Julie did not like to think of children in the troop as being _”trouble makers”_ because children were very observant of labels. She spent a good deal of time reminding the girls that Words were Powerful and that Words Could Hurt. While she meant that it was inadvisable to call people smelly, stupid or annoying; she felt it also applied to how commanding, authoritative and (least appealing of all) inquisitive Jaida Al-Sayf could be. 

It wasn’t Ms. Julie’s first year as a troop leader; it wasn’t even her first year working with children. She had majored in childhood development, she had worked as a school counselor and a teacher and once (very briefly) as a social worker. She had two beautiful daughters of her own; and she liked to think that, over the years, she had improved the lives of many, many children.

Of course, until Jaida Al-Sayf showed up to join her troop, Ms. Julie had thought of herself as patient, loving and kind. Now she felt every muscle in her body start to tighten the exact moment the door opened and Jaida walked in, looking overly smart in her perfectly pressed uniform. Most of the time her Dad dropped her off--he was a nice enough guy, always in a suit, always smiling at the other children and telling his daughter to behave and not scare the other kids. But now and again, her Father dropped her off and every time she did, it seemed (almost impossibly) as if Jaida’s normally perfect uniform attained a greater level of perfect. Her always shrewd stare grew shrewder. And while she bounced into playing with the other girls until everyone was present when her Dad dropped her off, she made a beeline for Ms. Julie any time her Father dropped her off.

Sometimes it was her little fist clutching a fat pencil while she asked for exact numbers regarding their projected earning for the upcoming fiscal quarter. (Ms. Julie did not know enough about numbers to even know if that was a real thing.) Sometimes she wanted to know who had created and developed the standard cookie recipes. Sometimes, she had three hundred questions about the handbook as she pulled her heavily highlighted copy out of her bag and cracked it open so she could make notes about the questions she had.

And sometimes, it was: “I would like to know if my brother could sell cookies with us.”

“Oh,” Ms. Julie said, “I’m sorry, dear. The cookie sale is for the members of the troop only. Since your brother isn’t a member of the troop he can’t come.”

Jaida stared at her. “Why?”

“Because he’s a boy.”

“He wants to wear the uniform, so he’ll look like a girl.”

That was a tricky thing to address. Ms. Julie set down the construction paper she’d been cutting into shapes and said, “well, but he’s not a girl. We welcome girls of all kinds and your brother is certainly allowed to wear what he likes but if he is a boy he cannot be a scout.”

“He doesn’t want to be a scout. He does not want to be a girl. He wants to sell cookies with us.”

“I’m afraid it’s just against the rules, I’m sorry.”

Jaida narrowed her eyes at her. “Why?”

Ms. Julie had never had a child bring her to the brink of drinking before this one. She’d dealt with children of all backgrounds, with all manner of different personalities, and not a single one of them had made her feel so incompetent as this one. There was nothing to correct either because Jaida was _always_ a picture of perfectly polite. Even when she stared an adult down from across the room, she never disobeyed a rule. No. Jaida obeyed the rules _exactly_. “The cookie sale is for scouts only. You cannot be a scout if you’re not a girl.”

“I understand,” Jaida said.

But that wasn’t the end of it. That was never the end of it. Ms. Julie never knew when it was coming, but there was always something brewing in Jaida’s mind.

\--

Jaida didn’t like most of her brothers, _most_ of the time. That didn’t mean that anyone or anything except for her was allowed to disappoint or upset her brothers. She came back from her troop meeting and found Sef on the couch in the front room, wearing her old uniform (as he had taken to doing) with his coloring book half-full of marker. He jumped off the couch to run over to her, “did you ask her?”

The truth was, Ms. Julie was technically right. The troop was meant for girls. There was a different troop meant for boys. Most of the boys (Darim, Tazim) were happy with their troop. They got sell popcorn once a year and they whittled things out of wood. (Well, her brothers didn’t because they were like 6, but when they got older they would.) It was just Sef that wanted to sell _cookies_. 

Everyone loved the cookies; nobody loved the popcorn. 

“She said no,” Jaida said.

Sef’s smile collapsed like his block towers usually did. “Oh. Ok.” That just meant he was going to abandon his dream of selling cookies and resign himself to the inevitable fate of popcorn. 

“Go change out of your uniform,” Dad said. “Both of you.” He walked down the hall toward the kitchen, leaving the two of them looking at one another. So there were no witnesses when Jaida huffed.

“We don’t need her,” Jaida said. 

“We can’t sell scout cookies without a troop,” Sef protested.

That was a minor detail. “I’ll get the troop. And the cookies.” She fixed the way his sash fell across his chest but he didn’t brighten up with hope the way her other dumb brothers did when she told them she’d take care of something. No, Sef was sullen and gray and never believed in anything until he saw it.

“It’s ok, Jaida,” he said. “Come on. Father said we’re going out to get dinner because he doesn’t want to cook.”

\--

Jaida liked to think that she was very aware of laws. So she knew, without a doubt, that it was illegal (and possibly outside the boundary of normally accepted morals) to get into her Dad’s credit cards. It was just that if she asked him if she could use them, she would have to explain why. There was a pretty even split that he’d agree with Ms. Julie (who was technically right) but a one hundred percent chance he’d tell Father. Father would agree with Ms. Julie.

So, she took one of his cards that looked like it had the most money on it out of his wallet and tucked it into her purse for safekeeping. She waited a day and a half before she put it to use. While her parents went out for a _date_ , she asked Lucy about what sort of bakery would make cookies. 

Aunt Lucy was always willing to help. If she weren’t, there was always Peyton who thought that just because she was three (and a half) years older, she was three (and a half) years smarter. They researched every bakery in the area and what sort of items they sold, in what quantities, at what quality and never once did Aunt Lucy ask her why.

\--

There was the matter of getting all of the girls in the same place at the same time. While Jaida wasn’t above stretching the letter of the law, she couldn’t very well ask seven other seven year olds to lie convincingly to their parents. Most parents were rather cautious about where their seven year olds went. (Some of them, like Father, were far too cautious.) It was just as simple to convince six of the seven girls that they just quietly leave their next troop meeting. It was supposed to be a joint project with two other troops and that likely meant glitter and screaming. 

(She would have asked Gwen to go along too but Gwen was whiny and she would have gotten them caught.)

\--

Dad had given her a card to keep in her purse (or book bag, or whatever she kept with her) that listed every number she would ever need on it. Father had told her that most of those numbers were only to be used in extreme emergency and the three numbers she really needed to remember were her two parents and the lawyer. 

The lawyer, Father said, got paid to answer his phone and no matter what was happening, he absolutely would make sure it was handled. (Dad even said that should she find herself kidnapped, she should possibly call the lawyer first.) 

One of the numbers was a car service that would show up wherever she needed it, no questions asked. She’d tried it once before when she was younger and Darim wanted chicken nuggets but Father was writing something in his office and kept saying, “in a minute,” on repeat. There was nothing as satisfying as pulling through the local burger chain’s drive through in a sleek rented car and exchanging her allowance for chicken nuggets just so she could throw them at her brother. 

He’d eaten them off the floor because Darim would eat anything; but there was still satisfaction in throwing them at him.

\--

“Where are we going?” Stephanie asked as soon as they had all crowded into the back of the car.

“This is a limo!” Marjorie astutely proclaimed.

“I’ve never been in a limo before,” was Rooney’s contribution to the conversation in progress.

“Is this your brother?” Zooey whispered. (She never talked very loudly.)

Jaida looked at Sef, looking very excited about everything, and then nodded. “We’re going to sell cookies.” She climbed toward the front to tell the driver to take them to the grocery store that Dad always went to. There was a different one Father went to; but Father was attracted to places that reminded him of where he grew up and Dad only went to places where other rich people frequented. “We can’t wear our uniforms,” Jaida said. “So take the sashes off. I made everyone pins.”

\--

The driver was very helpful about setting up their table, but he kept saying, “where’s the troop leader? Or your parents? Are your parents coming?”

“It’s okay,” Jaida assured him. “My Father is going to be here in a minute.” 

The driver didn’t seem convinced so he retreated to sit in the limo parked across two spaces, watching her from the front seat. The other girls were delighted by disobedience. They had opened the cookie boxes and slapped on the little paper signs that explained the prices of each type. Sef was clutching the coffee can he’d decorated as he bounced forward to attack the first set of unsuspecting victims.

The thing about Sef was that he was undeniably adorable. From his fluffy hair, to his round cheeks, to his sweet smile, to his skinny little arms, there was nothing but an orphan dog that was more likely to extract money from people than her brother. There he was, looking cute as a button, wearing a sky blue headband that matched his eyes and his skirt, both of his skinny arms wrapped around a coffee can, excited telling them all about the gourmet cookies they were selling.

\--

Jaida hadn’t brought chairs but she’d brought banner announcing the cookie sale and she’d thought up just about everything there was to think up. When the curious mother types with their kids asked about a grown up with them she told them her Dad was in the car. (He wasn’t, but the driver who was squinting at them with such ferocity played the part well.) When the other girls got hot, tired, hungry or thirsty she fed them cookies and drinks out of the coke machine on the sidewalk. When people asked about the ingredients for the cookies she gave them a printout to read. (She’d specifically asked for one when she ordered her cookies.)

Ms. Julie had taught them to be thorough and she’d included them in all the plans for the big cookie sale. She’d told them how to answer every question. 

What nobody had told Jaida, however, was that you had to ask permission before you camped out on a store’s sidewalk and sold cookies for profit.

\--

The store manager had introduced himself with, “where are your parents? Who is in charge here?” He was dressed too well to be a normal employee, wearing a name badge that commanded respect, waving his arm over the table and the general collection of bodies milling around it. Two of the girls were laying under the table because it had gotten hot and there wasn’t any good shade. “Who gave you permission to be here?”

“Uh--,” Jaida said. 

“You need to close the cookie boxes,” the manager (his name appeared to be Seamus) said with an impatient motion at the boxes. “You’re all coming inside so I can call your parents.” 

Those words caused a panic that no other words possibly could. Six little traitors that had always known they were doing the wrong thing, all at once, popped up to pointing fingers at her screaming (in various tones, and various words), “she made us come! We didn’t want to come, we aren’t even supposed to be here!”

“You’re all coming inside,” Seamus said. He was blustery and loud; trying to make himself bigger and more important when faced with the force of six crying little girls. “I’ll call all your parents so they can come and get you. Come on now.”

“Sir,” was the voice of the driver with his hand raised in greeting. He was jogging across the parking lot. “Sir, this is just a misunderstanding. If you just let me take these girls back to--”

“Are you responsible for this?” Seamus demanded.

“I work for--”

Good sense might have prevailed except for how everyone’s cell phones seemed to start ringing at once, and the manager who had been clutching his looked at the screen. His whole face went white as a sheet so that when he looked at her over the top of the cell phone, he seemed to be at a complete loss for words. “Did you kidnap these girls?” he whispered.

“Yes!” was half a dozen traitors looking for a way out.

“I would like to speak to my lawyer,” Jaida said. And since shit was hitting the fan (as Dad liked to say) she reached out to grab Sef by the back of his shirt and pulled him up against her chest. Once he was securely at her side, she turned to glare at the troop of little girls that were all making a perfect scene by crying all at once. 

“Come inside,” Seamus said, very differently than he had before. “I’ve got to call the police.”

\--

Jaida called Father because Dad had left town that morning. She didn’t call him because she _wanted_ to. While she stood in front of Seamus’ desk watching him try to breathe through the realization that his store would soon be descended upon by a mad house of concerned parents and interested press. He had been almost hysterical on the phone with the police explaining that, as far as he knew, none of the girls had been abducted but all of them were at his store, sitting on the plastic benches outside of his office, eating complimentary donuts from the bakery. 

“Yes?” was how Father answered the phone, sounding impatient to be interrupted while he was busy worrying about where his children had gone off to. 

“It’s Jaida,” she said. It was best to go slowly with Father because he had to think every new bit of information through. He couldn’t process too many things at once (probably, that was what happened when you got old). “I have Sef with me.”

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jaida assured him. “I brought the girls to sell cookies because Ms. Julie said that boys couldn’t sell cookies with the troop.”

And if poor Seamus was exasperated before, the way his hand slid across his mouth as he stared at her like she were an alien pushed him past that and into a dissociative state. Simply nothing made sense to Seamus then. 

Father breathed out through his mouth and cleared his throat. “Everyone is there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where are you?” That was far worse than Father asking many questions. It was the tone of voice that meant he had already arrived at a conclusion. There was nothing worse than having to deal with Father having already arrived a a conclusion.

Jaida mumbled where she was and Father said nothing for a very long time. “I have to give the phone to the manager,” she said.

“No,” Father said. “Let me talk to Sef.” 

So she passed the phone to Sef who had sat on the floor with his legs spread around his coffee can and happily started counting his dollars. He wasn’t completely certain what the difference between a one and a ten and a five was but he knew each of the bills meant something and the coins meant something else. He counted them all the same, each bill as a one, every coin as a penny. He took the phone happily and shouted, “Father, I’ve got a hundred dollars and fifty seven cents so far!”

Seamus looked at her with new horror, “how did you rent the car?”

Jaida tucked the card with the numbers on it back into her pocket. “My Dad is a billionaire.” 

“Of course,” Seamus agreed.

“He’s out of town.”

“Naturally.”

“So Father has to come get us,” Jaida took the phone from Sef when he was finished. “The manager needs to talk to you,” she said again.

Father said, “stay with your brother until I get there.”

\--

The pack of traitors were reunited with their sobbing families in full view of reporters with cameras. Seamus (apparently instructed by Father) had left her and Sef in the room with the assistant manager, a lovely lady named Wendy. While Seamus had been trying to understand the world (and failing), Wendy offered her a cold drink and sat in a chair with her legs crossed at the ankle while the two of them watched Sef count and recount his money. 

“We’ve put all your cookies on a cart,” Wendy said when it must have felt like she needed to say something.

The lawyer, Ms. Ferdinand (the second) arrived before Father. She had the distinct look of having been physically dragged sideways when she meant to go straight. Rather than be escorted, she’d pushed her way into the manager’s office and held out her crisp white card that simply had her name and a phone number underneath. She said, “I’ll be representing Ms. Al-Sayf and Mr. Ibn-La’Ahad from this point on. Tell me everything.”

Sef looked away from his mountains of cash then, cocked his head around to look at Jaida and said, “what happened?” as if he had missed everything leading up to that point.

“You can’t trust anyone but family, Sef,” she said. “I even left Gwen out because she’s a tattle-tail.”

“Ms. Al-Sayf,” Ms. Ferdinand said. Her tone was not sharp but gently reproachful. It was the sort of thing Dad used when he wanted to remind them that they had to behave but he didn’t want to say it outright. 

The office filled up after that, with a detective, and Seamus and Wendy and Ms. Ferdinand. Father came when the noise was at its peak, and Sef scrambled to his feet, clutching his coffee can to shout, “Father!” so loudly it made every other grown up shut up. They watched him run to Father.

Father picked him up, as any parent who thought he’d lost a child might, and kissed his precious little face. Sef didn’t care much about that as he wriggled and squirmed so he could show Father is horde.

Ms. Ferdinand interrupted the staring to say, “I assume that Ms. Al-Sayf can go?” It was a tricky question when she meant, _you are not detaining the child or else the full wrath of Altair Ibn-La’Ahad (possibly an eater of planets) will descend upon you with great immediacy_. The detective had the look of an out of date man who wasn’t used to being told what to do or think but he nodded his head.

Jaida got up and grabbed her drink. She didn’t drag her feet because she wasn’t a baby, but she didn’t go quickly either. By the time she got to Father he had maneuvered Sef so that he was sitting comfortably on his arm. Jaida looked up at him, “I forgot to ask permission,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed. 

On the way out, not a single employee, not even the ones standing by the cart of leftover cookies, asked them if they wanted to take the evidence with them.

\--

Desmond and Lucy wouldn’t have left the house even if Malik had tried to send them away. They’d come as soon as Malik had called for the boys to have a snack and Darim had informed him (like it didn’t matter) that Jaida had taken Sef with her. (She hadn’t, and Malik knew that because he’d been the one that drove her.) He’d called the troop to find that Ms. Julie had no idea where his daughter was. That had snowballed into six other girls also having gone. 

Lucy had confessed she’d helped search for bakeries a few days ago.

The police had been called, Malik left the two boys at home with their Aunt and Uncle to go and try to figure out where Jaida had gone. It would have been far simpler to assume that Jaida had planned an entire expedition and managed to pull it off but Malik got sidetracked into dark places.

Altair hadn’t answered when Malik called, so he called the lawyer instead. She called him back in less than five minutes to tell him that Jaida had called for a car and a limo had been sent to her. 

In all it was less than two hours that his daughter’s whereabouts had been unaccounted for. In two hours he’d gone from annoyed at thinking Sef was hiding from him, to vibrating with panic, to anger that there simply were no words to describe.

Altair wasn’t unreachable while travelling but difficult to reach nonetheless. Every single one of their mutually agreed upon guidelines stated that the children did not need to be present while the parents figured out what sort of discipline was appropriate to the situation. They always gave the kids space and time to cool off and gave themselves the same, but Malik had been neck-deep in thoughts about what people did to little girls that came from rich fathers (or girls that didn’t) and how anything could have happened to his children. He couldn’t bring himself to send Jaida to her room where he couldn’t see her with his own eyes.

“Can I go show Darim and Tazim?” Sef asked almost as soon as they were parked in the driveway. Malik walked him to the kitchen where Desmond and Lucy were overjoyed to see him.

But Jaida followed him miserably to his office and sat miserably in a chair and miserably stared at the floor. Malik wanted to hug her, to pull her up against his chest and kiss her face and tell her that she couldn’t do anything of the sort ever again because there was no name for the ugly, dark fears that grew out of his gut. He was stopped from doing so by the shrill, unwanted sound of the phone ringing. 

“Hello?”

And it would have made sense to him to be anyone of the many concerned parents who had suffered the same unwanted thoughts. (Except that only two other parents had the opportunity to notice their daughters were missing before Ms. Julie had to call them all and tell them.) Malik had told himself he would inevitably get calls on the matter and he was completely prepared to handle them whatever they may be. (Or to direct them to his lawyer; whichever was best.) However, the man screaming into the phone was shouting, “--what are your raising in your house? This is what happens when family has no meaning, this is what happens when you destroy traditional households! A family should have a Mother! How dare you endanger my daughter!”

“Sir,” Malik said. There was no way that Jaida couldn’t hear what was being said, not with how her lip curled up and her eyes dragged away from staring at the rug to look at him. “I appreciate that today has been stressful--”

“Stressful?” screamed through the phone. “I’m going to sue you! I’m going to sue you and take your house, and your car. I don’t know how it happens in your kind of families but in good, wholesome families, we don’t raise kidnappers.”

Malik moved the phone away from his ear and held it out to the side. He crouched so he was looking at Jaida’s dreary, downcast face. Their foreheads pressed together and she scowled because she didn’t want to cry. “Did you make them go?”

“No,” Jaida ground out between her teeth. “I asked them all if they wanted to go and they said they would. I didn’t even have to offer them money.”

Of course she didn’t. Malik kissed her forehead and brought the phone back to his ear. “Sir, I’m very sorry to inform you that my daughter did not kidnap any children. I believe they were offered the chance to ride in a limo and they decided to do so. The problem may be that in your good, _wholesome_ household you simply haven’t advised your child not to accept rides from a stranger as well as you should have.” There were problems with the argument, entire holes in his theory. 

“That little demon isn’t a stranger,” the man hissed. “Everyone knows your daughter. Everyone knows her; we all talk about her. She tricked Zooey. My daughter wouldn’t have gone along with anything like this--”

“Sir,” Malik said again. He sat down in the chair by Jaida’s. “I have to disagree with you. Zooey is a very bright child. I understand that today was upsetting but you shouldn’t insinuate that she isn’t as intelligent as Jaida--”

“What did you say?”

“I said, my daughter asked Zooey if she wanted to go along to sell cookies. If you don’t believe that Zooey has the cognitive ability to understand what she was being offered, I suggest you bring the matter up with your family’s pediatrician.”

Jaida’s lips quirked up in a smile at that.

“That’s not what I said.”

It was, more or less, exactly what he’d said. “Sir,” he said, “I respect that today has been very upsetting for you. I apologize that my daughter masterminded the whole affair. I understand that a higher level of intelligence can seem supernatural to those who are more average. I further understand that it must seem strange to imagine two men raising a child who is capable of the forethought, planning, determination and organization required to make the unfortunate events of today possible. I, personally, feel that we have managed to raise such an intelligent, capable daughter because we are not hindered by the very small lens with which you appear to view the world. I implore you, _please_ try to sue me. I would very much like to see what my Husband would do if you did. Have a lovely day, thank you for the call.” He hung up and dropped the phone in the chair to the sound of the man on the other end sputtering something like a rebuttal.

Jaida was looking up at him, almost hopeful, “Sef wanted to sell cookies.”

“You’re seven,” he said. “You scared me; you scared me so much.”

There were tears in her eyes then, “I’m sorry.” She lifted herself up and into his lap because she was sitting on the wrong side for him to get his arm around her. She pressed her face into his chest and he kissed her hair and closed his eyes and soaked up the whole reality of her right where he thought she’d be. “I’m sorry the man yelled at you.”

“Don’t worry about him,” Malik said. “I do think you won’t be allowed back in the troop though.”

“They’re all traitors,” Jaida said.

There were things to be said; important things about running off and taking cars and how she’d financed the whole operation. Just then, with her finally back where he could wrap his arm around her, he didn’t care very much at all about any of it. 

Then Desmond knocked on the door, looking repentant, “uh, it’s Altair.”

Jaida looked at him; Malik looked at her. They both made the same face of _no you have to tell him_ and then Malik held out his hand for the phone. “Our daughter kidnapped six girls and Sef today.”

“What?” Altair demanded from the other side of the Atlantic ocean. It was easy to tell him when everything ended alright and Jaida offered corrections and amendments when necessary. When they were finished, Altair said, “we’ve got a smart kid,” like a revelation and then, “did you call the lawyer?”

“They sent Ferdinand,” Malik said.

“Good,” Altair said. “Let me talk to the little felon.”


	2. Kitten Economy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> who among us hasn't tucked a kitten in their bookbag and taken it to school? I mean really.

Mrs. Jaidyn Mora had been an educator for the past twenty three years, ever since she emerged from university glowing with pride, joy and (what felt like, at the time), an insatiable need to guide young minds. She’d learned, over time, that while there those students that filled you with vigor and gave you hope for humanity, the sad truth was that time eroded all and any child that did not excel, rebel or suffer from terrible parents would eventually be forgotten. 

In twenty three years, she’d thought she’d seen it all. 

Then there was Sef Ibn-La’Ahad, the sweet-faced little boy with skinny arms and a bookbag full of cats. He was sitting in her tightly closed office, kicking his feet and idly playing with one of the three kittens that he’d successfully smuggled through half a day of lessons.

Ms. Rogone was standing with Mrs. Mora, the two of them staring through the clear glass windows at the little boy with his tipped down head and the kittens that were playfully attacking his fingers. “So, why does he have the kittens?”

Mrs. Mora drew in a breath and let it out again, “I haven’t asked.” It wasn’t that she didn’t want to _know_ because every fiber of her being wanted to know how the kid had set up a live-animal auction on the third grade playground. He’d had half the third grade class breaking their piggy banks and hoarding their allowances just for the chance of getting one of the kittens. “We have to call his parents.”

“Oh,” Ms. Rogone whispered. 

“I asked if his Dad was in town.”

“Is he?” There was a fragile, beautiful kind of hope in those silly, naive words. The whole school knew that everyone was expected to call the children’s Father first, as he was more reliably in driving distance and if he couldn’t be reached they could call the Dad who would call the Father and send him straightaway to get the children.

“No,” Mrs. Mora said.

“Oh.” They were quiet as they thought of it. It was silly because Mr. Al-Sayf had _never_ been unkind to any of them. He had never spoken a sour word or treated any of them with any sort of disrespect. He wasn’t fearsome; he didn’t threaten. It was simply that he seemed to carry with him an unattainable expectation and it felt (at all times) as if none of them were capable of reaching it. He was reserved, and understanding, and he never shouted but nonetheless every interaction with him left any person with the sensation that had failed to reach their true potential. “How out of town?” Ms. Rogone asked.

“He’s at his office in the city today.” That wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t be called. It was just that they had been directed to call Mr. Al-Sayf first and they couldn’t very well call Mr. Ibn-La’Ahad simply because they had non-specific reasons for not liking having him in the office. “Well, we have to call. I can’t ask him any questions without his parents.”

“No,” Ms. Rogone agreed. “Did he ask for his lawyer?” The idea should have been hilarious. The worst a kid at the school faced when brought to the office was suspension. (Although a few years back she had been forced to expel a young man. That had been a very sad affair for all involved.) Yet, every single one of the children would immediately repeat the phrase as soon as they were asked even a single question about any incident that might be viewed as being partially or fully their fault.

Mrs. Mora had neglected to call Jaida’s lawyer when the girl was brought to the office for punching two boys on the playground. She’d handed down a suspension because the girl had said nothing to defend herself. The matter should have been that simple; Mr. Al-Sayf was called, the situation was explained the suspension was given. It was never pleasant but it usually didn’t escalate. It didn’t appear as if it were going to escalate with Mr. Al-Sayf nodding his head along; but that didn’t stop the lawyers that showed up the next day asking her a thousand questions about the school policy. 

They terrorized the entire second grade staff with subpoenas; they interviewed every adult that witnessed the altercation. Then they presented their findings on the matter and it became very clear that while Jaida did punch the boys, and she would serve her sentence as previously outlined, something had to be done to address the two boys that had been (as they phrased it) terrorizing her. 

“I’m sure he will,” Mrs. Mora said. “Call Mrs. Kline’s class and have her send Jaida down to the office. I’ll call Mr. Al-Sayf.”

\--

Sef slouched in the seat and let the kittens tug at his undone shoelaces. He was trying to figure out exactly where he’d gone wrong. It had all started simply enough: he found a cat that was hungry, cold and unwanted. He’d put it in the shed with a can of tuna until he could find it somewhere better.

Seraphina, his friend, had told him that dogcatchers (a man with a pole and a rope that caught strays) still killed animals they caught even though it was 2028 and people should have evolved. He’d thought it was too barbaric to be true, so he’d asked his Father if dogcatchers were real. (They were.) And if they really killed animals. (And they did if they couldn’t find a home for them.) 

Sef couldn’t quite stomach the notion of turning the skinny, old cat in his shed into the dogcatchers just so they could murder it. A brief petition to his Dad on the matter of found animals and adoption did not end well.

“If you find a cat or a dog, we’ll take it to a shelter,” was Dad’s uncharacteristic negative response. If he’d listened carefully to all the many good points of adopting a cat in need of a home (in this weather, especially) he had still gently said it couldn’t be done. Apparently, behind the scenes of cat ownership there was a delicate balance of responsibility that Sef was too young to understand. (Or, perhaps, it was just that Father wouldn’t allow them to take in whatever pet they found on the street.) 

The house six doors down was put up for sale the same week he found the first cat and Sef didn’t really believe in fate, providence or God but there was no denying a happy coincidence when one happened. He’d no sooner installed the first cat (he named it Barley because it smelled like beer) into the empty house (thanks to Tazim’s continued interest in breaking and entering and the house’s deactivated alarm system) than he’d found another.

Then another.

Then a dog which didn’t seem to mind the cats at all.

Sef had ridden his bike to the store to buy pet food. It had taken almost his entire allowance for the week but he’d managed to get enough to keep his unwanted pets well fed. 

He hadn’t _intended_ to keep finding pets but he’d told Seraphina about it because he needed a better solution and she seemed to know things about animal shelters and dogcatchers that he didn’t. She kissed him when he told her (which was not why he told her) and brought him a one-eyed cat with parts of its ear missing.

One day he’d shown up with a fresh bag of cat food and found that one of the cats--a fat gray thing--had suddenly produced five new cats. The mewling kittens were like furry worms, wriggling around the floor in search of something to eat. 

“Really?” Sef had screamed at the (not so fat) gray mother who only yowled for food. She ate ravenously, constantly, always meeting him at the door when he came to dump food on the floor. He couldn’t let her go hungry and he couldn’t leave her wriggling, wormy kittens freeze on the floor so he snuck out old towels and blankets from his house. Then he’d gone back to the store for more cat food.

It was just that the demand for food greatly outweighed his ability to provide it. He’d managed to continue to get food by doing extra chores but six-weeks-out he was exhausted and the kittens were fat-bellied and _eating_ real food now. Another of the fat cats produced another litter and Sef didn’t sleep for two nights trying to work out how to get money to feed them.

Selling the fat, full-grown kittens seemed like the ideal way to raise money. He’d already sold two before he got caught. He traded them for money at bus stops. He only brought the three to school today because the stupid white dog he’d let in two weeks ago had _puppies_ and the fragile economy of the shelter couldn’t sustain itself anymore.

\--

“What did you do?” Jaida asked as soon as she let herself into the principal’s office. She looked down at the kittens without any of the warm-and-delighted joy the third-grade girls had. In fact, with her fists against her hips, she looked the very opposite of delighted. “I heard it from Maisy and MaKayleigh-Jorden that you were auctioning kittens on the playground.”

“I tried,” Sef said. “But I got caught.”

Jaida assessed the situation, and the kittens, and then shook her head. “You should have taken pictures of the kittens instead, dummy. How much were you selling them for?”

“Ten dollars.”

“Ten?” Jaida sputtered in disbelief. She ducked down to scoop one of the kittens up. “You didn’t research the market, Sef. I know a lot of third grade girls and you could have sold these kittens for twenty five, at _least_ and if you’d been smart about it you could have sold them up in the fifth grade and gotten even more.”

Sef shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Mrs. Mora is calling Father.”

Jaida put the kitten back on the floor and looked out the door to where the principal was watching them through the glass. She had been on the phone when Jaida got to the office but she wasn’t anymore. No she and the other adults were peering into the room, keeping their distance while trying to work out how to approach the situation. “Why were you selling the kittens?” she asked.

“I needed money!” Sef screamed. He kicked his feet and the kittens scattered. “Do you know how much money it costs to feed them? And they just kept being more! This isn’t even all of them! I’ve got six more kittens that aren’t old enough to sell yet! I have puppies, Jaida. Puppies! I’m not taking in anymore fat dogs because every time I do I end up with even _more_ mouths that I have to feed!”

His sister wasn’t blessed with patience, but she could laugh at anyone. She sat on the floor with the kittens when she stopped laughing and she said, “where are you keeping the cats?”

Sef was miserable and _tired_. He slid out of the chair and landed on his butt on the floor, with his arms limply at his sides, staring hatefully at the little money-suckers that were playfully attacking his shoelaces and his wriggling fingers. “In that house that’s for sale.”

“How’d you get in?” she asked.

“Broke a window in the backdoor,” Sef said. (He didn’t mention that it had been Tazim that broke the window because it had been Sef’s idea to start with.) “Dad’s out of town.”

Jaida considered that, “yeah,” she said. “Father loves cats though,” she offered. 

Sef let his head fall back against the chair behind him. “I’m tired.” 

\--

Father arrived with very little fanfare. He was invited into the room with Mrs. Mora using her Happy Teacher Voice, explaining, very _lightly_ that they’d discovered the kittens in Sef’s bag. “It is not something you see everyday,” Mrs. Mora said with good humor. “All the kittens are perfectly safe and nobody was hurt. We were only worried about where they might have come from and of course, nobody asked any questions until you arrived.”

Jaida looked up from the floor where she’d managed to get two of the three kittens to fall asleep in her lap. She said, “I did.”

Father did not look nearly as amused as Mrs. Mora was trying to sound. While he didn’t look angry, or upset, he did look very confused. It wasn’t something he’d admit to in front of the principal. Instead he said, “what _exactly_ was he doing with the kittens?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Mora said with a wave of her hand, sweeping the whole thing away, “auctioning them. It’s very silly. If you’d just take the kittens with you, we’ll consider the whole matter closed.”

Father would not consider the whole matter closed. He picked up Sef’s bookbag and looked inside at the paper the kittens had shredded and made a face at the ammonia stink of it. Then he nodded his head, “I’ll take the other boys with me as well, I think.” 

Jaida was already getting to her feet, clutching the two kittens she’d been holding the whole time. “Father, I don’t want to go. There’s an hour left of school and I don’t see why I should be punished because Sef has poor business management skills!” 

“Jaida,” Father said. He shook the bookbag while they stared one another down. Jaida had never won (but all the same it never seemed like she lost either) but she did gently set the kittens into the bag. She didn’t zip it up completely but mostly and held it against her chest where she could talk gently to the cats inside. “Come on, Sef,” Father said.

Sef got to his feet and grabbed the last kitten before it could run under the desk. He was all set to stomp out of the office but Father stopped him with a raised eyebrow and Sef huffed, “I’m very sorry for my behavior, Mrs. Mora,” as believably as he could. 

“Thank you, Sef,” Mrs. Mora said. For the apology or for leaving as quickly as possible, it couldn’t be sure.

\--

They managed the entire procession to the car without incident. It was only once they were in the vehicle that Father turned in his seat to look back at Sef and said, “ _why are you selling cats_ ,” exactly as if he had spent the entire fifteen minutes it took for them to round up everyone and all their things dying to ask. Maybe there was an edge of anger bubbling up somewhere at the very bottom but mostly his Father was head to toe exasperation as if he couldn’t understand what drove any boy to do any such thing.

“Because I’m broke!” Sef shouted back.

Father was stumped. There wasn’t much that stumped him; but he was genuinely stumped. He was leaning his elbow against the center console, twisted around to look at Sef, trying to piece together the bits of the conversation they never had and it wasn’t coming together for him. Everything came together for Father. “What?” he said with absolutely no anger. He was just _confused_.

Jaida (helpfully) leaned into his view and said, “Sef broke into the house down the street and made it into an animal shelter but a bunch of the cats and dogs he took in were pregnant and he used up all his allowance buying them food.” Then she relaxed back into her seat.

Father’s eyes closed and he bit his lips. He took a moment to collect himself before he opened his eyes again, “you _broke_ in?”

“Yes,” Sef said.

Father nodded very slowly. Sef nodded back. If Father’s eyes flicked to the farthest backseat to where Tazim was sitting, very innocently, it was only for a moment.

\--

Father wasn’t happy about being a party to breaking and entering but he insisted that he see the shelter before he made any judgments about what to do next. The sense that he’d frazzled some part of his Father that could never be unfrazzled did not fade but increase as he led them into the house (that now smelled like a barn). Every cat (not counting the kittens, there were ten of them) and all the dogs (only three full grown ones) ran for the door as soon as it opened. They were all wagging their tails like mad, yowling and barking and begging for food. The spots where he dumped the food were licked clean and the bowl he’d been filling with snow was bone dry. 

“ _Why_?” Father asked when he simply couldn’t contain it a moment longer.

“Because dogcatchers kill dogs!” Sef shouted back.

“This isn’t good for the animals, Sef,” Father said. His voice was like a steaming kettle, all full of hot air. “They need food, water, walks, grooming--medical attention.” That was all before he saw the fat-bellied puppies, mewling after their Mother that sidestepped their attempts to attach themselves. “ _Sef_.”

“Fine!” he shouted at his father. “Just call the dogcatcher and let them all die! You probably don’t care anyway, you probably think it’s better that way, you’re probably happy about it!” 

Father drew a breath in, sturdy and loud and sure, and then let it out again. When he unhinged his jaw, he said, “just because you believe you are doing good doesn’t meant that you are. Animals need more than an empty house and a pile of food, Sef. If you’d asked for my help I would have helped you. I don’t want any animal to suffer and I don’t believe in euthanasia.”

Sef was still caught up in fury when he screamed, “I don’t even know what that is!”

“It’s when they put the animals to sleep,” Father said (a bit more gently). He crouched over the sticky floor, not so far from a smear of dog poop, so he wasn’t towering over Sef but looking at him. He said, “I know you were trying to do something good.”

“I ran out of food,” he said.

Father looked very sad. “Okay,” he said but there were a hundred things he didn’t say. “I have to call your Dad.” He ran his hand through Sef’s hair and stood back up. “Where have you been buying food from?”

Sef rubbed his snot on his jacket sleeve and said, “the grocery store.” 

“How much was it?”

“All my allowance.”

Father frowned at that. Then he turned to look at Jaida as he pulled a few folded bills out of his pocket and handed them to her. “I’m going to call Desmond to take you up to the store, can you get dog and cat food?”

Jaida nodded.

“Sef, you and Tazim go back to our house and get the big mixing bowls. We need to get them all water.” He was already holding the phone to his ear while he gave out directions. There wasn’t much in Sef that felt like being generous but he wrapped his arms around Father’s waist and maybe he thought about saying thank you. It didn’t matter because Father was on the phone with Desmond.

\--

Malik considered calling the lawyer first. If only because he was a grown man standing in a house he didn’t own surrounded by two dozen hungry, dirty animals. It seemed like an open and shut case for any officer that might have wandered past in a patrol car. He called Altair when the children had left to do what he’d asked. He was stepping over piles of dog shit, trying to avoid puddles everywhere in the kitchen while the great mass of animals followed after his every movement. He’d made it only as far as the end of the hallway (where the smell was far, far worse) when Altair answered the phone.

Of course, at the end of the hallway the tile became carpet and he could see the full extent of the destruction. He meant to announce his purpose for the phone call in a clever one liner. (Something like, ‘our daughter kidnapped six girls’), but he said, “fine you can buy the house on our street you wanted.”

“Really?” Altair said, like he usually won arguments with afternoon phone calls. “Did you see some shady couple peering in through the windows? I bet they looked like child molesters.”

Malik closed his eyes and mourned the loss of his left hand. If he’d had it, he could have covered his mouth and nose to block out the stench. Or maybe his eyes so he couldn’t see the caked-on filth. Instead, he just sighed into the phone, “you’re the one that does background checks on the new neighbors.”

“Because you asked.”

“I did not,” was another argument left over from years prior. “Your son turned the house into an animal shelter, I’m standing in three feet worth of dog shit that has covered the carpet in the front room.”

“I hate carpet,” Altair said. (That was the truly important part.) “Sef?”

“Of course Sef,” Malik answered.

“I’ll call the lawyer. How are the animals?”

“Filthy,” Malik said. “Hungry? Thirsty. Otherwise fine. Oh,” he said as he looked at the stairs, overladen with their missing linens. “I found out where the towels have been going. I’m going to call Lucy. How long will it take you to buy this house and get the water and power on?”

“Probably not long, why?” _Probably not long_ meant something else, like _probably not long_ because _I already bought the house_ but there was no time to worry about trivial things like buying houses they didn’t need because there were bigger problems like the yowling cats and the placenta stains on the carpet.

“Because we can’t call a shelter to come get these animals in this condition. They need baths, several baths.” He turned around when the back door opened again and found Tazim carrying a stack of mixing bowls and Sef behind him dragging two jugs of water up the steps. “I’ve got to go, try to be as quick as you can.”

“Be nice,” Altair said. “We don’t know everything yet.”

“Power, water,” he said. He added an ‘love you’ to the commands before he hung up. 

\--

Aunt Lucy arrived with a mighty powerful, “oh shit,” as soon as the door was open. She stopped there and turned around to pull Peyton’s shirt up over her mouth and nose. Father had already called Uncle Desmond to ask him to get gloves and masks. He’d opened every window in the house while stepping carefully around the largest puddles and piles. 

Sef was petting the kittens while he crouched near an open window. Tazim was holding one of the puppies to his chest. He leaned sideways enough to say, “thanks for not telling them about the window.” It might have been too early for that kind of thanks when there was no promising that Sef didn’t tell on him later. 

“No problem,” Sef said.

The lights suddenly flickered on overhead and the refrigerator hummed to full life in its spot against the wall. A dog howled in sudden outrage and Father said something that sounded like ‘about time’ which seemed very unreasonable when it hadn’t even been much over an hour since he’d called Dad. The heat clicked on and the whole house seemed to shudder all at once.

“An animal shelter?” Lucy asked from behind her hand over her mouth. She seemed impressed, not angry, and that was a welcome change. She was shaking her head. “Quick question,” she asked, “where are we putting them in once they’re clean?” 

Father gave her a sour look. He looked back and forth at his options and finally located a door that led to pantry. He motioned inward at it like it single-handedly solved the issue. “Boys,” he said, “go and get a bunch of towels, and one of the cardboard boxes out of the recycling--a big one--and the new thing of cat litter.”

“Peyton,” Aunt Lucy said, “go get our fishing boots and the hair dryers. Walk with the boys both ways.” She shooed them out. 

Out in the backyard, Peyton shook her head at them. “That is the worse smelling house I have ever been in,” Peyton said. “Good going, jerk. Why couldn’t you just call the pound?”

Sef might have had a response (probably a very well put ‘shut up’) but Tazim beat him to it saying, “because he’s not a heartless bitch like you, Peyton.” That was one of those Grown Up Words that they weren’t allowed to say. (Because, as Father said, they simply didn’t understand their proper use.) It made Peyton stop short though and her whole pretty white face went red as a tomato as she ground her teeth. Tazim wound his arm through Sef’s and pulled him forward. “There’s two of us,” he whispered against Sef’s ear, “we can take her in a fight.”

And if they couldn’t, Jaida could.

\--

Once they had all the supplies (the gloves, masks, boots), they really got to it. Uncle Desmond took the dogs to the upstairs bathroom to scrub them clean in big tub. He had Peyton (who liked how it smelled better up there) to help him. Aunt Lucy took Darim to the downstairs bathroom with the big sink and washed the little cats and kittens. Jaida and Tazim toweled and blow-dried the cats that would let them and put them one-by-one into the pantry. 

The big cats, that didn’t appreciate being washed, were cleaned in the sink. It wasn’t easy doing when Sef’s hands were half the size of the gloves he was wearing (that had to be held on with Jaida’s hairties) and Father only had one hand to hold the cat still. They managed to get through half of it, rinsing the dirt and poop and god-knows-what-else of the cats with minimal wounds before Dad showed up.

“Excuse me, strangers,” he said when he opened the back door, “you’re trespassing in my house.” His smile fell as he looked at the filth and for a minute, his face blanched out pale. He looked in horror at Jaida and Tazim crouching by the clean part of the wall fighting over who got to hold the blow dryer and who had to hold the cat. The water had mixed with the poop smears had made a kind of slippery mud that was being tracked _everywhere_. “Malik,” Dad said with the greatest of patience. “The children need to go.” Every word was absolute. There were different ways that Dad said words--the gentle way, the usual way, the arguing way (for when he was debating with Father) and the absolute way. Father very rarely argued with absoluteness but even if he were inclined, the way Dad shouted, “ _Desmond!_ ” at the top of his lungs (scaring every animal in hearing distance) put a stop to it. 

Uncle Desmond came downstairs with both arms full of puppies and Peyton behind him was carrying their Mom. “Yes?” he asked.

“Please take the kids.”

Desmond never argued with absoluteness. He only said, “we’re going to take the Mom and puppies until you figure out what you’re doing.” 

“Yes, good,” Altair agreed. “Kids,” prompted immediate obedience. “Go home, shower in hot water. Wash twice.” He didn’t touch them but motion everyone out the door without so much as worrying over their jackets or hats. 

Sef looked at Father, still holding onto almost the last cat, and said, “I’m sorry,” because Father looked frustrated the way Dad looked horrified and the combination of the two made him feel like the bottom was going out of his stomach. He was outside, following after Desmond and the others, but he still heard Dad say:

“You let our children in here?” like the beginning of a very long argument.

\--

Tazim had whined about his shower, stalled about clarifying, “wash everything twice? My hair twice? My butt twice?” Darim had just taken a shower and Jaida had locked herself in her bathroom for an hour. Sef did his best to wash twice like he was told but mostly he sat in the tub under the water and wiggled his toes. 

He’d been trying to work it out, exactly where he’d gone wrong and sure Father made it sound simple with ‘you should have asked for help’ but, asking for help wouldn’t have made sure the animals weren’t put to their death. Maybe it would have stopped Dad from showing up and looking horrified, maybe it would have stopped the fight that his parents were probably having. Sure, he wouldn’t have been sent to the principal and he wouldn’t have had to wash a dozen cats (that really didn’t want to be washed).

He dragged himself out of the shower, into some pajamas and went to sit in the back of his closet behind his hanging clothes. He meant to stay there (possibly forever) but his room was invaded by his brothers who invited themselves into the closet with him. They were quiet as they crowded in but once the door was closed and they were nothing but little boy voices in the dark, Darim said:

“I would have helped you, you dummy.”

“Yeah,” Tazim agreed. “I mean, I would have helped _more_.”

Sef shrugged.

There was a thump on the outside of the door; that meant Jaida was sitting outside of it. She didn’t invite herself in the way his brothers did but she was always there just outside of the way when she was needed (or when she wasn’t). She said, “don’t worry about Dad. He just gets mad when things are really dirty. It’s not you.”

“It feels like it is,” Sef said.

“You didn’t poop on the floor,” Tazim assured him.

“Dad likes animals,” Darim agreed, “so does Father.”

Everyone was quiet. Sef pulled his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. It was pretty bad when nobody could think of anything that might make someone feel better. After a while (of thinking about Dad’s absolute voice, and Father’s exasperation) Jaida finally said, “you didn’t kidnap anyone, Sef. So I’ve still got you beat.”

“Yeah,” Darim agreed.

“And I called Peyton a bitch,” Tazim volunteered, as if they were all doing their part to take a little bit of the blame. He was quiet a beat and then shifted so he was closer to Sef. “Hey,” he said, “maybe we should figure out where to take the animals? We can all help. We can ask Uncle Desmond too. You know how Father likes us to be able to think critically.” 

“Come on,” Jaida said. She opened the closet door and let the light flood in. “Open the wall, we’ll go to the basement and figure it out.” 

Sef pushed the panel that slid back and rolled forward so he could crawl forward into the slide that Dad had built into their wall. He landed in the ball pit in the basement and crawled out. Tazim came down next and Darim after and finally Jaida. 

\--

Altair put the last clean cat in the pantry with the others and stripped off his shirt to throw it on the floor with the other trash. Every bit of his skin was crawling, every part of his body was vibrating with disgust and there was his husband, his wonderful-caring-loving-husband, looking at him like he was being unreasonable. 

“All I’m saying is, maybe not expose the children to the joys of malaria until after they reach the double digits.” There was no humor in the words because there was no humor in the situation because his children had been up to their literal elbows in shit. It was on the floor, and walls, it was waterfalling over the lip of the sink. 

“Malaria is spread through mosquitos. Cholera and dysentery are shit diseases.”

“I don’t care!” Altair shouted back. “Look at this place! You had our kids washing animals that we don’t even know what they have in a house covered in _shit_. This is not what we do, Malik!”

“I couldn’t send the animals to the shelter in the state they were in. The last thing we need is a news crew interviewing the neighbors about animal cruelty claims. He was _trying_ to do something good.”

“I don’t care about the animals!”

Malik sighed at him. He went still which meant he wasn’t going to give (not an inch). He’d done nothing wrong and no power on earth would ever convince him that he had. “Sef cares about the animals.”

“That’s not fair,” Altair said.

Malik shrugged. “So, what are we going to do?” 

That was always the question; every time their kids tried to one up each other. It was always the same. What were they going to do? How were they going to address the issue this time. Altair was caught up in the stink of the place, the crawling-filthy look of the walls so that he couldn’t think of anything that approached _addressing the behavior_. He would have to phone a fucking friend to come up with something that covered this situation. “I can’t think,” he said instead.

Malik pulled open the back door and motioned him out. They stood out in the pretty white snow where it was easier to breath. “I’m pretty sure Sef didn’t break the window himself.”

No, Sef wouldn’t have broken the window. That was one of the other brothers. (Probably Tazim, the only one of the children that could and _would_ lie.) Altair drew in a breath and let the cold settle in his lungs before he breathed out again, “what do you feel needs to be addressed in this situation Malik?” Every word might as well been its own sentence because he was barely holding in the need to return to shouting about his kids and dog shit.

“The treatment of the animals and the hiding.” Of course. Malik would have worked around to the breaking and entering sooner or later, but first the animals had to be considered. Because animals were helpless victims. 

Altair coiled his hands up in fists and shook his head. “I can’t do this right now. I need to go burn these clothes, and the clothes the children were wearing. Did you make them doctor’s appointments since you just rolled them in shit for God knows how long?”

Malik rolled his eyes but he tried not to make it too obvious. He came close enough he could pull Altair forward by the belt and looped his (filthy) arm around Altair’s back. “You can burn the clothes if you need to. The children are fine but, anticipating that you might react this way I did make them doctor appointments. I know that this is upsetting to you but I promise that I would not have allowed our children to help if I thought there even a small chance they would be harmed by it.”

“I might burn the house down too,” Altair said.

Malik didn’t look surprised. “We need to take care of Sef first.”

Altair closed his eyes and let his arms rest around Malik’s body. “Please don’t let our kids wade through waist deep shit again.”

Malik didn’t dispute the facts but say, “I promise I won’t.”

\--

Father was still in the shower when Sef went out back to where Dad was pouring lighter fluid over the clothes they’d been wearing at the house. He had come home and gathered them all out of the baskets and off the bathroom floors and taken them out to the fire pit between the yards without talking.

Sef stood by the blaze (smelling the unpleasant stink of the melting coats). “I’m sorry,” he said to his Dad. “I just wanted the animals to be safe until it got warm again and the dogcatcher kills the dogs.”

Dad folded precisely when he moved, dropping down so he was looking right at Sef’s face with one of his hands on his shoulder. He looked at him very carefully, and only when he was sure of what he was seeing he said, “you should have asked for help. There’s never anything wrong with asking for help, son.”

“Can we roast marshmallows, Dad?” Darim shouted from inside.

“No,” Dad answered without looking away from Sef. “Close the door before the dog gets out.”

“I couldn’t have asked,” Sef protested, “because Father would have said to send them to the shelter and they kill animals at the shelter when they can’t find them homes! Just because they have to live outside doesn’t mean that they deserve to die! That’s not fair. So what if it’s inconvenient for us to have another cat, or a dog. That doesn’t mean we just send them away to die.”

Dad licked his lips and he said (very quietly), “I can promise you that your Father would never, _ever_ send an animal somewhere it would be killed. You should have asked him, or me, and we would have helped you. What you did put those animals in as much danger as living outside would have.”

Aunt Lucy walked up to the other side of the fire with her own armful of clothes and motioned at the blaze until Dad nodded and then she threw them in. “I was going to say this is a bit extreme but, I understand.” Then she went back to her house. 

“Are you burning the clothes because we committed a crime and you don’t want there to be evidence?” Sef asked.

Dad snorted, “no. I’m burning the clothes because they were too filthy to clean and I don’t even want them in our garbage. Come on, go inside and get something to eat. Help your Father figure out where the animals can go that will be safe.”

Sef sighed, “ok.” But he didn’t want to. Inside, Father was making dinner out of leftovers in the fridge while Jaida was reading him information off a webpage on her tablet. 

“We think we found one,” Jaida announced when she saw him. “Father found it and he wants to know what you think.” She thrust the tablet at him and Sef took it out of her hands and tried to concentrate the words like _no-kill_ and _spacious_ and the pictures of cats lounging in sunny windows. 

“We can take them tomorrow,” Father said. “After the doctor.”

Sef shrugged, “it looks okay.”

Father said, “we’ll do some more research on it after dinner. Make sure it’s the best one. That was just the first one we found, there might be one better suited.”

Sef skimmed through the website, not really paying much attention to the words. He was too tired to care anymore (about anything) but everything still felt like it was going to fall in around him. He wasn’t prepared for his body to dip sideways or for Father to be there to catch him. “Sorry,” he mumbled again. His arms fit around Father’s neck and Father’s arm was around his back, holding him up just long enough to move him to the couch in the den. Father kissed his head and Sef yawned.

“Sleep kid,” Father said. “We’ll take care of the rest in the morning.”


	3. A Dragon, baby

It was not that Samantha had not seen children wander past the wide-open doors of the corner jewelry store she worked at. It was a _Family Mall_ (so the tagline said) and that meant there were enough children to trip over at any given time. They were only sixteen storefronts removed from the play area and a mere eighteen removed from the food court. She had suffered through the unfortunate snot-nosed toddler wandering past digging so far up his nose he’d lost a finger in the excavation. 

And truthfully, it was a jewelry store. In her experience (limited to this job), children were attracted to bright, shiny things. Kids gawked, girls lingered and all in all the whole mad mob was retrieved by parents and guided away. So, she _had_ seen the boys (all three of them) pass by the store with their shoulders shoved together and their heads ducked together. She had made note of the one boy that doubled back (five or so minutes later) and she resolved to keep her eye on him as he made a great show of looking over the display cases. 

It seemed like the sort of thing that someone (probably her) would have to address because little boys whose jeans covered their shoes did not belong in her jewelry store. She had even gone so far as to signal to the manager who nodded his understanding that they had another unwanted (goblin) sneaking in. Her full attention wasn’t devoted to the boy because she was guiding a nervous almost thirty-something through picking out a diamond that wouldn’t make him go bankrupt (his words, his exact words on repeat) so he could propose to his girlfriend.

Nothing on the _planet_ could have prepared her for how the boy sidled up to the counter, head cocked back to look at the little tray of tiny diamonds, the way he smiled at her with gleaming white teeth, and how quickly his hand darted forward to pluck a diamond from the tray. She didn’t even have the time to exclaim in shock before the kid had shoved the diamond into his _mouth_ and she had only managed, “What are you--” before he swallowed it. She shouted, “he ate the diamond!”

The boy was grinning at her, elbow across the glass display case, making some attempt at winking. “I’m a dragon, baby.” Then he turned like he was just going to leave. 

The manager was only halfway to picking up the phone to call security when one of the gentleman in uniform came around the corner (probably drawn by the noise) and the boy stopped dead still when he saw him. It was a tense matter of seconds before the kid relaxed into a slouch while standing and nodded at the security guard with absolute calm. 

“You’re going to want to call my Father,” he said.

“He ate a diamond!” she shouted again. (It bore repeating, as far as she was concerned. Even a few more times.) 

“You ate a diamond?” the security guard asked.

“I’m a dragon,” the kid agreed with a shrug. “Dragons eat jewels.”

For a minute, it seemed that the world had come to a standstill. It seemed that nothing made sense, and nothing could ever make sense again. Everyone from the stock-still manager to the baffled security guard, to the formerly frantic fiance were all completely still and staring at the kid. 

\--

Darim was sitting on the hard plastic chair inside the security guard’s office. There was a guy with a taser standing and staring at him. He could hear the sound of men in the other room trying to make sense of what had happened, and every so often they would all go quiet and one of them would say, “he ate it. He clearly ate it.”

They’d sent the other security guards out to find his Father after they’d very sternly informed him that he’d committed a serious crime and that he needed to have a parent present with him. They’d grilled him for a whole minute about how he’d gotten away from his Father and where they could find him and Darim had stared them down without speaking. He said, “I want a lawyer,” like he’d seen on TV.

It didn’t matter if he told them where Father was because Sef and Tazim would already have gone to tell on him. It was only a matter of time before he’d be found out. In the meantime, he leaned back into the hard plastic back of the chair and let his legs swing. Every time they did, the security guard watching him (whose name appeared to be Tad) got a little angrier. Those veins on his neck popped out a bit more; his hands curled around his belt a bit tighter.

In the other room, someone said, “he ate it. He really ate it.”

Right on time, the door opened to reveal his Father. Malik was holding Tazim’s hand (like he was a baby instead of an eight year old) and Jaida was gripping Sef’s wrist like she was going to rip his whole arm off any second. “Can they sit here?” Father asked the man who escorted him in.

“Yes, that should be okay.”

Sef didn’t cry when Jaida shoved him toward the seats because nobody cried when Jaida was so angry she wasn’t talking. Sef slid into the chair without complaint and made room for Tazim to occupy the spot next to him. Jaida took a place next to the security guard watching Darim so she could stare him down with the same authoritative disapproval. She was wearing a white dress with pretty gold accents and a dangly purse that hung off her narrow shoulder but she made the six foot-something, two hundred pound guy at her side look small. 

“Did he call Dad?” Darim whispered.

Tazim stared at Jaida.

The security guard said, “no talking.”

Sef leaned forward far enough to shake his head no. It was the most solemn headshake any boy had ever shaken. Then he leaned slowly back into place. 

“Man,” Darim said. He stopped kicking his feet. “I’m going to jail.”

And, like he’d heard, there was Father in the other room, being very agreeable with, “I agree, you should arrest him. Have you called the police?”

Jaida was so angry she was grinding her teeth. When she managed to unhinge her jaw long enough to spit any words out, she only managed, “ _boys_.”

\--

Things did not escalate quickly. Despite big talk from tall men, no man really wanted to arrest an eight year old boy. Father spent fifteen minutes arguing with the head of security and the manager of the mall about how his child was a felon and deserved to be arrested while they tried to work out some alternative. (That was a Father Classic, as they liked to call it, one of those things where Dad brought them popcorn and sat with them and said, ‘boys you need to watch very closely as your Father agrees with someone so hard they start to disagree with themselves.’) 

“Jaida,” Darim whined when it became clear that Phone Calls were Being Made. The manager of the jewelry store had intervened to stress the seriousness of the crime and how no matter how young felons could not be allowed to go unprosecuted. “Jaida, _please_.”

“No talking,” the security guard said.

Jaida crossed her arms over her chest. She had no pity for him. In fact, if it came right down to it, she would probably have let him go to jail and testified against him in court. There was no telling with her. But Sef hiccuped a cry and Tazim finally looked at Darim with watery-eyes gone all pink around the edges. His brothers were breaking down under the pressure and Jaida rolled her eyes so loud it made a sound. She looked up at the security guard, “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

That presented a conundrum because Father had to be retrieved. Father assured them Jaida could use a restroom without assistance when the offered to let her use the single-stall staff bathroom in the hall. Another security guard went with her so she didn’t wander off and Darim looked over at his brothers (who were both crying and holding hands and staring at him as if he were set to be executed). 

Darim didn’t cry, but sit with his hands in his lap. It was hard to think around the enormity of going to jail, but with what little brain he had left to manage it, he had started to think that (perhaps) jail would be a preferable alternative than going home with Father. In fact, as he sat there, praying Jaida had a conscious and some loyalty to her brothers, he was thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be in jail.

That was, of course, before the police officer arrived.

\--

Altair arrived at a mob scene. There were three police cars outside the mall. Three police cars and four officers to arrest one eight year old kid. He found his son in the backseat of a squad car. They’d had the decency enough not to cuff him.

Darim saw him and shouted, “Dad I’m sorry! Dad don’t let them take me to jail! Dad!”

Up on the sidewalk there was Malik in the center of three men in business suits, three uniformed police officers and three children looking as cool as a cucumber (or any other garden vegetable). Tazim was holding his hand and sucking on his fingers while Jaida was holding Sef’s hand and looking _bored_. His sons were crying (which meant they were involved somehow) and he walked up just in time to hear someone that sounded very much like a manager saying:

“Well, of course, we take theft very seriously. It’s simply that, as a child, he may not have understood entirely what he was doing. He told our sales woman that he was a _dragon_.” 

(In fact, if Altair had been only ten minutes later, Malik might have managed to get the nice man with the diamonds to pay _him_ for the privilege of being robbed.)

“Excuse me gentleman,” Altair said. “The young boy in the backseat of that patrol car is my son. I’ve brought my lawyer.” (A rather young Mr. Walters the second (or third).) 

For a moment, every man except Malik stared at Altair as if he were insane. Luckily he’d gone through the trouble of keeping copies of all pertinent legal documents on his person. Mr. Walters produced not only copies of Darim’s birth certificate, adoption papers (certifying Maria had no claim to his children but Malik did) and ID card but also Altair’s marriage certificate. (He had other documents with him as well, as one never knew when one would need their child’s shot record on a second’s notice.) The moment wavered in and out of focus as the men in suits and the police officers worked through accepting that Darim had two fathers. 

Mr. Walters glanced at Altair and he said, “I want my son out of that police car.”

Then he went to work, like a wind up toy set loose. Darim was released in a matter of minutes; Altair took the precaution of holding his hand while the lawyer escorted them all through the mall and back into a cramped office. While the men with suits worked out settlements, Malik sat with Tazim and Sef in his lap (both of them peering across the narrow aisle to Darim, obviously still mourning his demise). Jaida invited herself to sit on Altair’s lap (since there were no more seats) and she leaned against his chest and pulled her phone out of her purse. 

“I told you that getting me a phone was a good idea,” she said. 

Darim’s hand squeezed Altair’s so tight it seemed he was trying to break his fingers. When Malik looked as if he weren’t listening, the boy leaned against his arm and said (very fast and very slurry), “Dad, maybe you should let me go to jail. I just think it might be better for the family, you know.”

Altair looped an arm around his shoulders, “son,” he said (quietly), “you just committed a felony. Jail is too good for you.” Then he ruffled his fingers through the kid’s hair. 

Darim slouched into his chair, arms over his chest, trying his very best not to burst into tears. 

The ordeal took less than twenty minutes to come to fruition. Money changed hands and as things often went with these sorts of issues, they all walked out free men. Mr. Walters took the car back to the office and Altair drove everyone back to the house. (If only to give Malik time to really work through exactly what he meant to say to their son when they arrived at the house.)

\--

It was sunny when they got home. Jaida left first, apparently unbothered by her brother’s impending execution. She was gone only twenty seconds. Just long enough for Dad to get out of the car before she circled back to slap her hand against the car door. “Sef,” she said with no patience, “ _Tazim_ , get out of the car.”

Sef said, “I’ll remember you, old boy.”

“You were a brave one,” Tazim agreed. They both slid sideways across the seat though, running toward the house as soon as their feet hit pavement. 

There was nobody, and nothing, to spare him from his Father now. Darim hid in the back corner of the car as long as he could stand it. (For forty-five seconds or so.) Then he darted forward, across the seat and over the middle console in the front. He landed against the steering wheel which made the horn go off and startled Father. Darim was on his knees pouring out the whole stupid affair starting with:

“We _were_ on our way back, Father! We _were_. We went to the bathroom and we were coming back. Sef was saying that I couldn’t be a real dragon because I was a human and real dragons didn’t exist and that’s just stupid. Obviously I’m not a real dragon but Tazim said that I was and I couldn’t say that I wasn’t because Sef is stupid and he never lets anyone do anything. So Tazim said that I was one and I could prove it and we walked past the jewelry store and then Tazim said that I was a dragon and I could do anything and dragons ate jewels. Sef said I would _never_ eat a jewel and then I said I would so. And--”

Father didn’t speak, just lifted his eyebrow to indicate he wanted to know what had happened next.

Darim sat back against the car door. “It felt important,” he said. Which, looking back at it now, was no real defense. His eyes were hot and his face felt puffy. He stared at cup holder rather than look at his Father. “I’m really sorry,” he did manage to get through his throat. “You can take me to jail if you think I should go.”

“I cannot take you to jail because there is nobody to press charges against you,” Father said. “Policemen do not generally arrest boys that they can’t say have committed crimes.” He was quiet long enough that Darim dragged his stare away from the holder up to his Father’s perfectly composed face. “But, you did commit a crime.”

Darim nodded.

“It wasn’t a little crime.”

Darim nodded.

“I’ll talk to your Dad and we will decide what will happen. Perhaps, while we’re discussing that you should take a moment to think about why your pride was more important than the law.”

Darim nodded.

“Go up to your room, we’ll call you down soon.”

So Darim went, dragging his feet the whole way.

\--

Jaida invited herself into his room with a juice box and a bag of carrots. She dropped both of them in his lap while he hid in the corner of his room. “I was supposed to be picking out my new dress, Darim.” It was the wrong time to tell her that watching her fuss about different clothes was the single most boring thing he’d ever experienced. He didn’t tell her how she was the one that insisted they go to the mall because she’d made friends at school that loved to talk about how they went to the mall. “Well, you’ve convinced Sef you’re the coolest person ever born. I don’t think he cares if you’re a dragon or not, he just watched you get arrested for swallowing a diamond.”

“It’ll be less cool when I’m grounded to my room for six months,” he muttered.

“I don’t think they’ll care,” Jaida said. She sat with her back against his toy box and looked at him with a shake of her head. “I wanted to get a new dress.” That was the sticking point. The thing that Jaida was most angry about. Everything else was a minor inconvenience. 

“You tried on every dress in the store,” Darim countered. “It was boring.” 

She shrugged. “I called Dad, remember that next time. I saved your butt; you can sit down and be bored and not do stupid stuff when it’s not your turn.” Then she got up again and motioned at the juice box and carrots. “Make sure you eat so Sef doesn’t think your intestines will be shredded by a diamond.”

\--

Altair was not always sure what the kids assumed happened when they retreated to Malik’s office. He assumed they viewed the whole thing as a couple of men in black hoods retreating into their dungeon alcove to plot what method of torture they would use next. He knew for _sure_ his children thought Malik was humorless and cold hearted; and it was for precisely that reason they could never find out how Malik collapsed into his desk chair and buried his face into his arm to laugh until he cried.

He was red-faced and shaking, leaning back into the seat with tears rolling down his face, trying to say, “he said he was a _dragon_ ,” wheezing out of his swollen throat.

Altair sat on his desk (because the chairs were uncomfortable). He’d mounted some fairly elaborate defenses on his children’s behalf over the years. (Perhaps his favorite involved defending Jaida on the count of peanut butter theft. He argued her innocence despite how she’d managed get an entire teaspoon of peanut butter stuck in her hair.) “You did say you would support our children in their life choices. We thought that meant they might want to be heterosexual, we couldn’t have known one of them would be a dragon.”

Malik tried. It was evident from how his mouth worked toward a rebuttal but he collapsed again, falling forward to laugh against his desk in some attempt to quiet it. 

“Were you really going to let them arrest him?” Altair asked. 

“Yes,” Malik said. He leaned back into his seat. “It didn’t seem like they were going to let me let them but, yes I would have let them take him to the station. I would have called you if they had actually taken him.” He wiped the tears away from his face with his shirt sleeve. “Jaida called?”

“Yes,” Altair said he picked up a letter opener to fiddle with it. He’d expected a lot of things from his kids, but he’d never quite thought he’d end up paying for a diamond his son was going to shit out. “We should make him save it,” he said. “Tell him that’s the diamond he has to give his fiancee.” And he meant it to be serious but he was working toward laughing watching Malik try not to.

“Oh shit,” Malik whispered and that set him off again. “Oh, fine. What _are_ we going to do? We’re not keeping a shit diamond.”

“Make him work to pay for it? I’m sure there’s plenty of filthy jobs you want to expose our children to. You could make him clean up trash by the side of the highway or something along those lines. So he’ll get hepatitis but really learn his lesson.” 

“He wouldn’t get hepatitis.”

“He might,” Altair said. “Since, he apparently will eat anything.”

“We could make him miss the vacation; tell him we had to spend his part of the trip on paying for the diamond he stole.”

Altair didn’t like it; he wasn’t a fan of anything that involved one of his children being removed from the others. He dropped the letter opener back into the box and shrugged. “Community service seems more apt. As he is a felon, he should be required to pay his debt to society.” 

Malik shook his head. “A dragon. He ate a diamond to prove he was a _dragon_.” Then he smiled at Altair. “Altair,” he said _very_ seriously.

“Yes, Malik?”

“You have a dragon son.”

Altair did laugh then, and Malik leaned forward so his chest was between Altair’s spread legs. He played with the end of Altair’s tie (because it was there). “I can’t believe he ate it,” bubbled up out of his chest. Because Darim had _eaten_ a diamond. “He ate a diamond.” The more he said it, the less real it sounded. “How long are we going to make him sweat?”

“Maybe an hour,” Malik said. “Hey,” he said with the tie curled up in his fist so Altair was looking at him. He’d gone all serious so the pink was fading off his cheeks. It was all the earmarks of a _meaningful_ conversation because somewhere below the hysteria, Malik was truly disappointed in his kid. (In this case, it was just buried very deeply beneath the ridiculousness of the situation.) 

“What?” Altair asked. He leaned forward so they were closer together, so he could feel Malik shift against the insides of his thighs. Malik was tipping his head so anyone might get the wrong idea about what he was going to do. “What?” he asked again.

Malik was close enough to feel his breath when he said, “you have a dragon son.”


	4. Running Away

For Mr. March, it had all started with the shattered vase. During the investigation that followed there would be numerous theories bandied about that ranged from the ludicrous (that he had always harbored a seething level of hatred for the impeccably dressed, well-mannered but ultimately insidiously evil children) to the disappointingly bland (that he had been perturbed by a bit of vandalism and a well-timed fart prank). 

However, facts were facts as his Mother had always said and the facts were this:

A vase in the right upstairs wing of the mansion had been mysterious shattered. It was far more than simply a vase as Mr. Ibn-La’Ahad has repeatedly said. It was a vase that had survived world wars, depressions, storms, thefts, fires and up to the moment it was unceremoniously thrown on the floor, every child that had ever lived in the home.

He’d asked perfectly reasonable questions:

“Which one of your brothers did this?” (He felt it was most likely Tazim; but it could also have been Darim. A pair of devils, those children.)  
“Are you lying to protect your brother?” (They were.)  
“Do you realize how valuable this vase was?” (They did not.)  
“What were you doing with the vase when it was broken.” (The various lies he received were: nothing. Sleeping. Exercising in the yard. Walking the dog. Picking my nose. And, from the girl child who could not be frightened: that’s frankly none of your business.) 

While it wasn’t Mr. March’s duty to worry over the children, it was his duty to manage the mansion and present it to the public in good condition. He didn’t hate the family that owned it; he would never dream of asking them to simply refrain from their occasional day visits but nonetheless he was filled with a sort of deep rage every time they arrived.

It must have been that rage, and the outrage of having a priceless antique unceremoniously smashed to bits, that made him lock the three boys in his office until he could locate their parents. (He might have locked the girl in as well, if he could have found her.)

\--

 

“Great,” Darim said. The door had closed and the locked and turned with a finality that suggested there would be no escaping their collective fate. “Why’d you throw the vase?” he demanded.

“Why’d you throw the book?” Tazim snapped back. He stuck his hand out at Sef, “why’d he throw that stupid wooden head?”

“The wood head and the book don’t break, dummy.” Sef had crossed his arms over his chest and slouched in his seat in the way that suggested he would be no help to anyone while he contemplated his inevitable demise. “So why’d _you_ throw the vase?”

The truth was, caught up in the moment, Tazim had not had enough time to properly think through his options. The vase had a handle that let him lift it and that had been the only deciding factor he needed. Truthfully, up to the moment it shattered on the floor in a great snowy powder Tazim could not have imagined it would break. Trying to say that was the same as trying to argue that glass couldn’t break and his two smart ass brothers would have immediately started calling him stupid. 

(The odds were, Tazim figured, if there was a stupid child in the family, it was probably him. That didn’t mean he needed his brothers reminding him every minute.) 

“Look,” Darim said. “He can’t leave us in here. He has to go find Dad. And Dad is just going to be mad that we were locked in here like dogs.”

“It was Dad’s vase, he’s probably going to be upset about that too,” Sef said. He stood up so he could turn and look at both of them at once. “So, what are we going to say?”

“Tazim threw the vase,” Darim said. He glanced at Tazim and shrugged something that might have been an apology in another life. “If we lie to him about it or try not to tell him then he’s going to ground us and I’m already missing a football practice because we had to come out here so I don’t want to miss the next one because I’m grounded because _you_ threw a vase.”

“Darim,” Sef said (reproachfully). 

“Whatever,” Tazim said. He didn’t waste his time joining in Sef arguing for solidarity over personal interest. Darim was making some kind of case about how he would always be there to protect one another but he had obligations to his team (as the best player on it, apparently). Tazim wasn’t listening because he got up to pull his chair to the window. They were big, and heavy, with locks that stuck and pulled from lack of care. (Dad wouldn’t be happy about that either.) He was three-fourths through getting one open before either of his brothers seemed to care.

“What are you doing?” Sef asked.

“Look,” Tazim said. “You tell them whatever you want. I don’t care.” He shoved the window as hard as he could and it rattled in the frame, moving by fractions until it was open enough a skinny kid like him could slide out. There was a screen but that was easy enough to deal with. He grabbed the letter opener off Mr. March’s impeccable desk. 

“Tazim!” Sef shouted. 

“You want to wait in here, fine,” Tazim said. “I’m not waiting around for that stuck-up dick to come back with Dad just so I can listen to him call me names. I know when I’m being called stupid.”

Darim huffed and stood up. “You’re not stupid, Tazim. You just make stupid choices.” (That was their Father’s favorite technicality.) “Come on, man. What are you doing?”

Tazim stood on the chair so he could put his legs out through the narrow window and sat on the sill trying to peer through the glass at what he was going to land in. (Looked like dirt, mulch probably.) He rolled onto his stomach as he slid through the window. Sef was shouting his name just before he stuck his head out through the window. 

“Where are you going?” Sef shouted.

“I don’t know,” Tazim said. He didn’t exactly have a real plan and he didn’t think it mattered. 

\--

Tazim took his bike because he might have been stupid but he wasn’t _stupid_. Only tourists and idiots tried to walk the grounds of the mansion. The driveway was almost a mile long and it was five-or-more miles to the nearest evidence of real civilization. 

He hadn’t been blessed with book smarts (like Sef) or endurance (like Darim) or genius (like Jaida) but he knew which way to go to find trouble. 

Every Christmas, they were treated to a retelling of That Time Tazim Got Lost in London. It wasn’t a factual representation of what had happened because Tazim hadn’t been _lost_. It was stupid to squabble over facts but he’d known exactly where he was going and exactly where he was; his parents simply didn’t accept that because he’d been out-of-sight he must have been wandering without direction. It was just that, he’d handed his plane to Sef who put it on a shelf in the store, and when Tazim asked for it back he found out it was gone. But it wasn’t lost. Sef said “I lost it,” when he meant, “I left it.” 

So, Tazim had gone to get it.

That was different than now, because _now_ , Tazim did not know where he was going. He simply knew that all he wanted was the old house, his parents, Mr. March and his brothers _behind_ him. 

\--

There were not many things that Malik disliked the way he disliked being settled for. It had come up often enough when it came to dealing with staff issues, or public functions where he was required to wear nice suits and make small talk with men who wanted Altair to like them. There was always that moment of intense disappointment that preceded the attempt to hide it as they slapped a smile on and pretended as if he were as good as his husband. 

To be fair, Malik didn’t like Mr. March even a little. As the man treated his children like they were an inconvenience and an insult to his own rule over the house, Malik didn’t even feel inclined to hide his displeasure at having to interact with the man.

“Ah,” Mr. March said when he found him. “Mr. Al-Sayf, I require your attention in my office.”

“About what?” he asked.

“It regards the children, sir.”

Malik did not immediately sigh. If this were any other person he might have smiled, he might have said _of course_ , or he might have not immediately assumed that Mr. March was, yet again, fabricating reasons to hate his children. Rather than waste his time inquiring about what they’d done from the man whose biased opinion invariably fell on the side where his children were common criminals, Malik just followed the bastard back to his office.

Malik did not say a word when he found the office was locked. He held his tongue as Mr. March began speaking:

“I do apologize, but it took me some time to get all of the children in one place and as this is a serious matter I did not want--” He swung the door open inward. He must have expected three chastised boys, shivering in their seats, because he gasped outloud to find Sef and Darim rolling on the floor with balled up fists. They were spitting threats at one another, issuing insults and drawing blood wherever they could. 

Sef had a fat lip, Darim’s shirt had been ripped so it was hanging off his chest entirely. They didn’t stop just because the door opened. Sef was screaming like a warcry until Darim punched him in the nose. That cut the noise short but it didn’t stop his skinniest son from kneeing his brother in the crotch. 

Malik and Altair had already disagreed about violence. Altair said that rather than expect their children to never use it that they teach them how to use it safely and to give them spaces where it was appropriate. He’d taken them to all kinds of classes, letting them try out everything they were old enough to give a go. 

Darim shoved Sef backward so he could fold forward over his body with tears streaming down his face. He wasn’t saying anything, exactly because all his focus was diverted to his injured testicles. 

Sef fell into a chair but didn’t seem to notice as he howled, “ _everything_ ’s more important that your stupid football practice!” He levered himself up to his feet with his elbow on the seat of the wooden chair, rubbed his fist across his bleeding nose and just then seemed to notice Malik and Mr. March standing there. “Get up,” Sef said to Darim.

Darim was still clutching his crotch but he looked over his shoulder to see Mr. March and all that abject agony mutated into brand new fury. He grabbed Sef’s skinny wrist to pull himself up to standing (and even managed to stay on his feet) as he looked Mr. March dead in the face, “what do you have to say?” he shouted, “huh? You think you can call us degenerates and puerile and--”

“Vacuous,” Sef added, “obtuse.”

“Loathsome!” Darim added.

Malik watched Mr. March’s face go red and then white. His sons were bleeding, their faces were covered in sweat and tears. Sef was working up to some grand statement if the rise and fall of his heaving shoulders was anything to go by. Mr. March turned away from the boys to look at him:

“Mr. Al-Sayf I wou--”

“Shut up,” Malik said. “It does seem like you’ve said enough.”

Sef said, “we’re not _spoiled_. We’re not _entitled_. Just because you like to pretend like you _own_ this house doesn’t mean that you do! And you can’t go on acting like we’re too _witless_ to understand what you’re saying because we’re _kids_ , we’re not _stupid_.”

Mr. March opened his mouth to mount a defense and Malik silenced him with a shake of his head.

“Boys,” he said. “Where’s Tazim?” And it wasn’t until that moment, as Darim glanced sideways at it, that he even noticed the open window and the slit-open screen. He drew in a breath and let it out again, looked at Mr. March and said (as politely as possible), “leave this house immediately. Do not speak, do not loiter.” Then he held out his hand toward his sons and motioned them forward.

\--

Tazim stopped at the park because it had a water fountain and a bathroom. He hadn’t planned to ride six miles into town so he hadn’t brought money with him. He drank the room-temperature water and weighed the odds someone would steal his bike while he was in the bathroom and decided to risk it. It was just a pleasant surprise when he came out again and it was still there. 

It wasn’t that he’d outgrown playgrounds because he was barely ten years old, and his Dad was forty (or something like it) and he _still_ loved playgrounds. He took them whenever he could, to make Father stare at him in horror as he walked across the top of the monkey bars. Father wanted them to make educated risks and Dad encouraged them to try anything they could. 

“Hey,” interrupted his half-thought-out plan to keep riding or go back. He looked over at the girl in the jean jacket smiling at him. “Nice bike,” she said. 

It was, objectively speaking, a nice bike. “Yeah thanks,” he said. She was going to keep on walking, across the park toward her house or her friends. Tazim who tried to think things through found that half-the-time, his thinking was done after he started talking. Or else, the thinking happened while he wasn’t aware of it. His mouth was always saying things like, “I stole it.”

Nobody appreciated crime like a ten year old; that Tazim knew. He could tell stories for hours about the things he’d done (even if he hadn’t done them) and all the crimes he’d gotten away with. From lock-picking to grand theft, he’d spent half his vacations convincing kids in other countries that he was on the run from authorities. (Because nobody was as eager to be gullible as a ten year old either.) 

“No you didn’t,” the girl said. She had brown hair, and painted-pink nails. Her stare lingered on the bike, on how dirty his clothes were (from falling in the flower beds). There was the slightest hesitation when she considered whether or not he was a shade of brown she was willing to believe. 

“I swear,” Tazim said. “You don’t believe me?”

“So, where’d you get it?” Her hand was on her hip (like Jaida did all the time) and she flipped her hair back over her shoulder. They were practicing at being something more than kids, what with how he inched forward with his toes pushing against the pavement so she could get a better look at (him) the bike. It was shiny in the sunlight, as pretty as money. 

“I took it off someone’s porch,” he said. “Nobody locks up their bikes around here. You can take anything you want.” 

She was weighing that statement, working up to whether or not she believed it. Maybe he looked like what she’d been taught criminals looked like. Or maybe she was looking for something to cure the boredom of being ready to grow up when nobody was willing to let you. “Prove it,” she said.

“Sure,” he said (without thinking), “you got a bike in mind you want?”

Her laugh was sweet as sugar. She looked sideways, not at him, thinking about if she wanted to participate or not. After a minute she nodded her head, “yeah I’ve got one.” 

He patted his hand on the handlebars of his bike. “Well, hop on. Let’s go get your bike.” 

“You’re really going to steal a bike?” she said.

“I said I would,” Tazim assured her. “What’s your name?”

“Isla,” she said. “You?”

“Tazim,” he answered. 

\--

The bike she wanted was purple, not a bad bike as they went. He’d seen one like it when they were shopping for his but Dad had turned it down because it had poor reviews for longevity. Father pointed out the seat would wear out if it were used too frequently. (Also something about the tires, and wear and tread and the quality of the metal. It was hard to keep up with Father’s opinions when they never seemed to end.) It was in an open garage and that presented an obstacle that Tazim hadn’t considered before.

(Of course, the fact that he’d never actually stolen anything was another obstacle but last year Darim ate a diamond and that was much, much more expensive than a bike. So his parents would probably forgive him.) 

“Whose is it?” he asked.

“This girl, Brittany who used to be my friend but she stole my boyfriend that she said she didn’t even want. I mean, he’s a creep but that doesn’t mean that she should have taken him after I told her that I liked him.”

Tazim held the bike still so she could get off the handle bars and then he climbed off himself and held it out to her. “What was so great about him?”

“He’s cute,” Isla said. She rolled her eyes about it, “look, boys don’t need reasons to like girls. You don’t care about what we think, you just care if we think you’re great and we look like magazines.” 

There was a bucket of crazy in that statement (much like the buckets and buckets of crazy that Jaida kept filling up) but Tazim hadn’t come this far just to be stopped by something as silly as that. Besides, Isla was wearing lip gloss and jingly bracelets. He could appreciate that; the way he could appreciate her staring him down waiting to be disputed. “Okay,” was what he said. “Brittany sounds like a bitch. Hold my bike.”

Isla was _delighted_. She took the handlebars from him. 

“Just,” he said as he stepped away, “get on the bike. We’ll have to get away fast.”

“Okay,” she promised.

Tazim had watched Sef pretend to be casual enough to know that no guilty man ever looked _casual_ when he tried. It wasn’t a matter of acting like you were up to nothing but convincing yourself that you weren’t. He always imagined he was like Dad because nobody moved the way Dad did. Nobody else he’d ever met moved with the authority and the unapproachable entitlement that Dad did. (Except maybe Jaida, who still wasn’t as good as it as Dad.) 

You just had to believe it was right, that you were right or in this case, that he had the right to steal this bike. With a brain like his that did all of its thinking behind curtains, it wasn’t that hard to convince his whole body he deserved to take this bike because some girl named Brittany was a boyfriend-stealer. He invited himself right up the drive, right into the empty garage. He tipped his hat (or would have, if he had one) to cat that was lounging on a shelf with paint cans and got on the bike. The kickstand moved easily and he gave a little push that gave him the momentum to roll down the sloped drive and into the street.

He didn’t look to make sure Isla was with him until they were down the street, but when he looked over his shoulder she was pedalling to catch up, screaming with joy as she went. 

And well, it wasn’t every single day that you made someone that happy. 

\--

They found a shady spot behind a convenience store that wasn’t too visible from the road but not so far from it they couldn’t escape if they needed to. Isla let his bike fall in the gravel when she jumped off it to run over and hug him. Tazim was willing to forgive the scrapes because he’d never quite been hugged with that much enthusiasm before. 

She went to buy them a soda (not something he was allowed to drink often) from the store and they on the edge of concrete behind the store with their shoulders against the bricks. “She’s going to be so angry,” Isla said. “What are we going to do with it?” 

“Keep it?” Tazim asked.

“I can’t keep it. I live on the same street and how would I tell my parents that I got a new bike?” She took a drink and then passed him the bottle so she could lean forward and run her fingers across the bike. “We should break it.” 

That seemed a bit like a waste but Tazim was the last person on the planet to go off trying to convince someone not to get revenge on who wronged them. He’d shaved Darim’s head in the middle of the night and he was grounded for two weeks and he hadn’t managed to be sorry about it a single minute of those two weeks. His brother deserved it and both of them knew why. That was the thing, really. The sort of people that had revenge done to them were the sort of people that knew why. 

“You got a bat?” he asked. “You could bend those tire spokes really easy.” He took a drink of the soda after her (without even wiping off the spit). “Maybe a branch?”

“Oh,” she said. “I know where we can go. At the park, there’s a trail that you can walk or ride on. It’s perfect, barely anyone ever even goes there.” She took the soda back when he handed it to her and finished off what was left. 

“Cool,” he said. 

\--

Tazim’s brain was a bit of a maze sometimes. Sometimes, it seemed to let out to conclusions he didn’t even know he was working toward. (And sometimes it felt like, he’d been dropping string the whole way in and following it the whole way out and he never could find the exit.) So maybe he hadn’t known that vase was going to break when he picked it up; maybe it had been a real bad surprise when it shattered into snow on the floor.

Maybe the whole time he was getting stared down at by Mr. March with the crooked nose he was thinking how stupid he really was, about how anyone could get their hands on glass and think it wouldn’t break. Or maybe, it was just the way Mr. March looked at him, always at him, like everyone (everywhere) already knew that there were one-two-three of the Ibn-La’Ahad brothers but maybe one of them wasn’t as smart or as strong as the others. Mr. March looked at him like it was just a _foregone conclusion_ that he’d found the guilty party. 

Tazim wasn’t working out how it had started to feel true; how often it felt like it was his stupid mouth that got them in trouble. He hadn’t been ready to have his two fists wrapped around a fallen tree branch, feeling screams in his chest bubbling up in rage. He was unprepared to handle how it would always have come to this moment:

Darim volunteering him as a criminal because it was _inconvenient_ to share the blame. Or Sef straight-backed and incapable of understanding that not everyone had a brain like a computer, that sometimes boys thoughts in circles, not straight lines. Sooner or later, Jaida simply wouldn’t be there to stand up to men like Mr. March that treated her brothers like filthy rats. 

No, Tazim hadn’t thought he was working through losing his brothers and sister the way Isla was working through losing her best friend. But there he was, grinding his teeth as he aimed the big part of the branch at the delicate spokes of the wheel. They groaned and whined and broke under the attention. 

\--

After, it was Isla against his shoulder with blood on her hands from the rough bark and dirt under her pink nails. She was smiling with the sweat pouring all down her face. Tazim didn’t feel like smiling but he felt _better_ than he had before. 

“Should we just leave it?” Isla asked.

“It’s in too many pieces to carry,” Tazim said. “You can tell them I did it. I don’t mind.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

Tazim shrugged. There wasn’t enough time to tell her all the ways it didn’t matter. Stealing a bike (especially one as cheap as that) wasn’t nearly as bad as eating a diamond, or kidnapping a troop of girls, or Sef and his animal shelter. Tazim wasn’t asking Dad to make a spectacle of lawsuits with angry parents, or buy diamonds that got flushed down the toilet, or buy houses ruined by cat shit. Tazim had the money in his account to buy the stupid bike twice over. “Maybe,” he said. 

Because Father would worry. Father would care. Father would look at the bike, at all it’s pieces, and he would start putting it all back together. All the things that brought them to this moment, all those little unsaid things that maybe Tazim had buried somewhere inside the maze of his brain. He wouldn’t quit until he’d wound up all the thread and found the way out. 

Isla leaned in against his body to kiss him. It wasn’t anything he was expecting (or wanting) but her lips against his made the whole world seem a little less heavy. She smiled, all nerves and butterflies, and he cocked his head to really look at her. He thought he would tell her they should go, because they should, but he kissed her instead. It wasn’t much like the movies (because whatever those feverish, wet kisses in movies had, Tazim didn’t have at present). He kept his tongue to himself and she did the same but nonetheless they kept pressing their mouths together. 

\--

Tazim was a gentleman so he took Isla back to the park where he’d found her. She asked for his phone number or a screen name and he figured it would be years before he saw any kind of electronic again but he wrote it down for her anyway. Just in case she needed to give it to the cops. 

He was going to go home but he went back to the shady place where they’d broke the bike. It took a bit of effort but he managed to twist the back wheel out of the frame and pushed his hand through it so it dangled off his wrist. 

Objectively speaking, it was a nearly perfect crime. Nobody had seen him (as far as he knew) take the bike. They’d dropped it in a part of the trail nobody was likely to see it without trying. It was just that Isla was the best suspect and she was working up to feeling guilty so it was only sooner or later that she’d confess the whole debacle. 

He was tired, and hungry, when he knocked on Brittany’s door. He stood on the step holding the tire in his fist and waited until a woman answered the door. She was on the phone (not with the cops) peering out from behind the screen door at this strange boy clutching a bicycle tire on her porch. 

“I stole this bike from your garage,” he said. He held up the tire to offer it back to her. 

She said, “I’m going to have to call you back, Mom,” into the phone. He could almost have predicted how she tipped her head back into the house to shout for her husband. It was no surprise at all to him how he looked at her. “What bike?” she asked (like it mattered).

“It was purple,” he said.

“Where are your parents?” was the next question.

Tazim shrugged. 

\--

Malik took the boys to the kitchen first, because they needed ice (in many places) and he left them sitting there with towels and ice packs. “Stay here,” he said when he walked away from them.

His second stop was the groundskeeper to start the search for his missing son. 

While he was moving from the groundskeeper to Altair, he called Jaida. She was hiding in one of the east wing rooms, safe from Mr. March (who she said was ‘having a temper tantrum again’) and he sent her to the kitchen so he knew where most of his children were. Altair was in the filing room in Phyllis old office. He was sifting through dusty papers in the old, old cabinets, looking not at all impressed by what he found. “Have you come to save me?” he asked.

Every part of Malik was filled up with fury; every single part of him was thinking how much more convenient it would be if Altair had been there when Mr. March went looking for him. All his daydreams were bloody fantasies of what his husband would have done to that man if he’d heard his sons’ words. “I don’t know everything,” Malik said because he _didn’t_ , because there was more to find out but he knew _enough_ to get started. “I’ve sent Mr. March home and I would like, at the very least, to see that he never returns.”

Altair pushed the filing cabinet shut with more effort than necessary. “What happened?”

Malik told him how he’d found it: about a broken vase, and a locked door, and a fist fight between their sons and how Tazim had gone out through the window. He told him the words Sef and Darim had shouted, and how Jaida had hid. 

Every

Single

Word

Seemed to fill Altair up with something like fire, that roasted all the inside of his body so the people skin he wore was thin-and-crisp. He said, “I’ll handle it,” as good as promising to dismember the body and dissolve it in lime. “Where’s Tazim?”

“I have the staff looking for him.”

“Check the bikes,” Altair said. He was grinding his teeth, staring at where his hand was on the filing cabinet. “Can you handle the boys?”

“For a bit,” Malik said.

“Give me an hour,” whether that meant to find and murder a man, or to calm himself down, there was no telling. “I’ll have my phone, call me as soon as we know anything. I’ll call the sheriff in town, have him look for Tazim.”

When Malik was back in the kitchen he found Jaida listening to the boys tell their story. She said, “I didn’t think he’d lock you in a room,” with more guilt than she deserved to carry. “What happened to Tazim? Why did he leave?”

“I don’t know,” Darim said. Sef glared at him with blood still caked on his face until Darim relented. “I said we should just tell on him. I didn’t think he was going to just _leave_. I wanted to make my next practice.”

Jaida scoffed. “Tell them I broke the stupid vase,” like it was that obvious. Then she got up, “we need to go check the bikes.” She turned around and saw him there, and knowing nothing about what he’d heard or not heard she said, without absolute authority, “I broke the vase.”

Sef clambered to his feet, “I did it!” 

Darim dragged himself up, “I did it,” seemed least convincing of all.

While there was the matter of the vase, and how it got broke, Malik did not possess enough energy in his body to waste it over stupid things that none of them (not Altair, not him, not the children, not anyone that mattered) cared about. “We need to find Tazim,” he said, “the vase doesn’t matter now.”

(And really, despite what Mr. March might have thought, it had never mattered.)

\--

Mrs. Brittany (who had not told him her name) was unlike anyone that Tazim had encountered. While Mr. Brittany was a great deal like Any One’s Father, all bluster and loud, shouting behind the door about wanton theft and criminals there was Mrs. Brittany pleading on his behalf saying things like: 

“He’s just a child.” And, “no you’re not calling the cops, David I’m serious put down the phone. We don’t even know where he’s from. He’s covered in dirt, he could be homeless.”

But actual Brittany appeared on the porch from the yard while he was sitting on the porch swing. She looked like the sort of girl that would pretend to be your best friend and steal your boyfriend. She was as pretty as magazine pages, white as milk, looking at him like he was something that had crawled out of the toilet. “So, you’re the jerk that took my bike?”

Tazim held out the tire, “here,” he said, “you can have it back.”

Her lip curled back over her teeth as she regarded it. “Yeah,” she said instead, “you can just keep it.” Then she picked at the paint on the porch railing and listened to her parents shouting at one another inside the house. “Don’t you have parents?” she asked.

“Not like yours,” he said. Since she didn’t want the wheel and he didn’t feel like holding it anymore, he just leaned forward and propped it up against the porch rails.

“You mean parents that actually care about you?” she asked. Maybe in her house the very worst thing she could think of was being uncared about. (And somehow, Tazim didn’t believe her version of care was the same as his.) “Parents that teach you to steal bikes? What are they drug addicts? Are they in jail?” (It might have been fun to tell her exactly who his parents were.) “You’re going to jail.”

“They send kids to juvenile hall,” he said. “Recently, the focus has shifted away from sending kids to juvie and more toward providing them with resources that address the root cause of the crime.” (And Uncle Kadar thought none of them listened when he talked.) 

Brittany didn’t care much about that with her lip curled up in disgust. “What’s your root cause, brain damage?”

The front door open and Mr. Brittany emerged with the distinct look of a man that was barely holding his temper. Just behind him was Mrs. Brittany look as if she were a breath away from an apology. (Wouldn’t that be funny, to have her apologize to him when he’d stolen the bike.) “We’ve called the police,” Mr. Brittany said.

Tazim remembered the police, remembered all the useless men in uniforms and Darim in the backseat of a patrol car. He remembered Dad and the lawyer and thought, that was just too much of a spectacle. He said, “could I call my Father please?”

Mr. Brittany was going to say something like, _you can call him in jail_ but Mrs. Brittany said, “of course,” and handed her phone over to him while her husband glared at her back. Brittany was crying now, saying something about how he’d broken her bike while she wrapped her arms around her Dad. 

That, too, was too much of a spectacle for him. Tazim waited for Father to answer the phone, and didn’t expect him to sound so worried about it when he did. “Hi Father,” he said to Malik’s anxious, (hello?). “I’m at,” he turned in the porch to look at the numbers on the house and read them off, “Oak street. You can probably get here before the police.”

Father didn’t say, _what did you do_ but, “are you safe?”

“Yeah,” Tazim said. He looked over at Mr. Brittany breathing in and out through his nose like a great-big-bull. “Are you coming?”

“Yes,” Father said. “I’ll be there.”

\--

Tazim invited himself off the porch because he didn’t like the way Mr. Brittany kept staring at him. He didn’t go far (because Mr. Brittany seemed like the sort to chase a kid if he tried to escape) just down to the sidewalk. He was sitting flat on his butt with his legs crossed, idly pulling the weeds that were growing in between the grass when the squad car pulled up. 

He expected POLICE because the city was full of them but this one said SHERIFF on the side of it and the man that got out of it looked like he’d only just finished crossing himself to ward off evil. He came around the front of the car faster than Mr. Brittany came down from the porch. So there was nothing to spoil his opinion of Tazim when he tugged at one of his pant legs and crouched in front of him. “Are you Tazim, son?” he asked (very politely). 

“Yes,” he said.

It was a funny thing, how relieved people were to find him. Every person that had ever found him (in that shop in London, in stores, in the neighborhood) had that same look like they’d only just escaped certain death. They were always so _nice_ when they found him, always _reassuring_. The Sheriff (Johnson) didn’t touch him but said, “your Father is very worried about you, son.”

Tazim nodded. 

Mr. Brittany was there in an instant, “this-- _terrorist_ \--”

Sheriff Johnson was back on his feet in an instant, “Sir,” he said very reasonably. “Sir, there’s no call for those kinds of accusations.”

There was Brittany, standing behind her father with her arms across her chest smiling at him. Tazim got back to his feet and bent to pick up his bike because it seemed like a good, logical step to have a way out. He smiled back at Brittany. 

“What are smiling at?” Mr. Brittany shouted at him. “Yeah, keep smiling kid--because your ass is going to jail. You know what they do to kids like you in jail? You’re going to learn a whole lot in jail, kid. So keep smiling.” 

Tazim did keep smiling and that didn’t seem to make Mr. Brittany any happier about the situation. Sheriff Johnson got in the space between them, both of his hands raised up to keep Mr. Brittany from getting any closer. His voice was calm and modulated but Mr. Brittany was shouting.

“Why are you protecting him? That little bastard stole my kid’s bike. Go up on the porch, get the tire,” he was talking to his wife or his kid. The wife didn’t move because she was still trying to remind him to be calm but Brittany went up to get it. 

“He’s scaring me,” Tazim said. It wasn’t (entirely) a lie, but the words had a polarizing effect on the Sheriff who knew exactly who his Dad was. The Sheriff went from trying to find peace to reaction. 

“Sir, put the tire down. Sir, if you don’t put the tire down I will have to arrest you.” And like divine providence (or very good storyboarding, as Mother said) a second patrol pulled up.

“Me?” Mr. Brittany shouted. He waved the tire at Tazim, “that’s the criminal!”

\--

Father arrived to a circus. Tazim was sitting on the back of a sheriff’s car with his bike leaned carefully up against it. The neighbors had been drawn out by the noise and the flashing lights. Isla was standing there with a woman that had to be her Mother, watching open-mouthed at the spectacle. Two deputies were wrestling Mr. Brittany into a squad card while Mrs. Brittany was clutching Brittany against her chest. 

A perimeter had been created around Tazim, two or three full grown men in tan uniforms had been put in place to protect him. That had been the breaking point for poor Mr. Brittany who had started screaming words that did not bear repeating and threw the tire at the Sheriff. The man was still snarling and growling like a rabid thing while they stuffed him into the squad car. 

(All this, Tazim thought, over a bike that was basically a piece of trash.)

Clearly prepared to be stopped, or questioned, Father already had his wallet out to show his ID and the Sheriff let him through immediately. Sheriff Johnson was having quite a day, because he was shouting, “get out of the way, move and let him get to his son. For fuck’s sake,” quietly to himself. The tire had caught him across the arm and the broken spoke had shredded the sleeve and skin beneath. One of the deputies had called an ambulance which added a sort of hysterical element to the situation that had been missing up to that point. 

Father was well known for disapproving of misbehaving. He was a fan of consequences. He expected little boys to make good choices. All that, and all of how cold he could be when disappointed, and there was Father looking like he wanted to cry, dragging Tazim up against his chest. 

Sheriff Johnson was just beyond Father’s grip, in the world of light and sound. He said, “you should go ahead and take your son,” was very understanding, “we’ll get this all cleaned up. We’ll maybe need a statement when you’ve got the time. Just so we get the whole story.” 

“Thank you,” Father said. He didn’t let go of Tazim and Tazim didn’t see any shame in wrapping both his arms around his Father’s shoulders and hanging on. It afforded him the ability to not see all the faces of all the people that were staring at him. It was hard to hear much of anything like that, so he could barely hear any of the things that Mr. Brittany was still spitting at the window of the patrol car. 

\--

Things were far, far simpler when the world narrowed down to two people. That was him and his Father, sitting in the backseat of a car. They didn’t go home immediately (but Father did call to say that Tazim had been found, and that he was unharmed) but drive nowhere, or everywhere, or anywhere. Father and him were slouching together, taking up the same space, soaking up the blessed silence.

“What happened?” Father asked.

“I didn’t know the vase was going to break,” Tazim said. “I mean, I know glass breaks, I just didn’t think about it.” It seemed so stupid and so small to have gotten so out of hand. He looked at his Father’s face to find the disappointment that should have been waiting for him but Father just looked very sad. “I took that girl’s bike and I broke it.”

“Why?”

Tazim shrugged. 

Father put his arm around him and pulled him like he was going to hug him. He kissed his hair like he did when he didn’t know what to say. (That didn’t happen to Father often.) When Tazim wasn’t looking at his face, he said, “I wish you wouldn’t run away. It’s very scary when you don’t know where your children are.” But, more than that, “I want you to tell me about Mr. March.”

Tazim picked at his own fingernails; he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about that. “What about the bike?” he asked.

“We’ll talk about the bike in a bit,” Father promised.

“I don’t like the way Mr. March looks at me,” he said. And there was more, much more than he thought there’d be locked up in the maze of his head. It poured out, mixing up Mr. March and his brothers, and Isla who kissed him and Mr. Brittany who called him a terrorist and screamed his filthy words at him. 

It drained out of him until he felt old and dry and exhausted.

\--

Darim and Sef were on the steps of the house when the car finally found its way home. Tazim was bruised by the day, feeling like he’d been worked over but nothing like Sef’s black eye and Darim’s busted lip. Jaida was there too, looking perfectly furious to see him in that way she always did when she hadn’t been there to save them. 

“Where did you go!” Sef shouted. He ran while Darim limped and Jaida tried not to look like she was running. They converged on him with too many arms and too many questions. He didn’t have enough answers for all their questions, but he didn’t mind them hugging him. 

He didn’t mind the way that Jaida pulled him up against her side and said, “you should have told me,” like she already knew everything. 

“Football doesn’t matter,” Darim assured him. He meant it too, (at least for then).

“I beat him up for you,” was Sef, clearly proud of himself, motioning at Darim’s busted lip. “I kicked him in the nuts.” 

Tazim laughed at that, and Darim scoffed in objection. 

Father behind them said, “everyone in the house. Come on, everyone in.”

\--

The mansion lacked the comforts of their home. It was as big as that stupid mall Jaida kept dragging them to without any semblance of having been lived in. Tazim had suffered through a guided tour (because Sef begged) and he’d played everything from hide and go seek in the lower east wing to lazer tag in the halls. They’d hosted movie screenings, and parties and reunions and not once in all the time did it have anything resembling familiarity or comfort. 

“Where’s Dad?” Jaida asked. All their bags had already been packed and brought down to the foyer. A second car was being sent to take them home (the first was far too small for the job) but in all the explaining about how they were leaving now, Father had not mentioned Dad once. “Is he coming with us?”

“He’ll meet us there,” Father said. “He had to take care of something.”

“Can Tazim even leave? Isn’t he a criminal?”

“You idiot,” Sef hissed at Darim. “Dad is probably calling the lawyers.”

Father’s looked at Tazim, just to be sure he was okay, and then said, “that’s enough with you two. No more fighting.” If there was an answer to whether or not Tazim was a criminal (he felt like one) it must not have been available at the time. What mattered to Father was taking them somewhere that was not _here_ ; so he packed them all in the car to go home.

\--

The truth was that Altair did have all his emotions. It would have been a lie to say that he did not feel all those annoying things that everyone felt. He could be jealous, scared, angry, sad. He could linger in discontented fogs. He could feel listless, restless and unfulfilled. There were no empty slots as far as his emotions were concerned. 

No, what Altair lacked was the ability to care how other people must feel. He had some concept of what they felt, he’d memorized all the signs of stress and fear when he saw them. He understood the ringing bells of anger when they blushed up on other men’s faces. Malik saw people as human, and that gave them inherent worth. Altair saw people as wooden puppets that might become human one day and that reduced their value to their immediate usefulness. 

Malik felt anger like fire; something that was hot and hard to control. He used it up in quick burns or he stoked it to last him for (months and months and years if necessary). To Malik, anger was useful but also reckless. His husband could say anything when angry and not mean it in ten minutes when he was calm. 

(There were many a school building that had not been burned down despite what Malik initially thought.) 

This was the reason that Malik did not like to be in front of his children when he was angry. He let them know he was feeling it, and that he needed time to be calm, and he came back again when he had reached a point that he could be. Their children thought of Malik as a mythic beast; they assumed his anger was the greatest monster imaginable because they only ever saw it’s slithering tongue and it’s sneaky tail whenever Malik couldn’t find a safe place. They saw glimpses of it when their Father protected them, and it was a useful monster then. 

But Altair’s anger was a void. It was soundless. When it came, it filled up every part of him with an intense feeling of relief as if he had simply been waiting all these years for this forgiving moment. It stretched out under his skin, fitting so nicely inside that anyone might have mistaken him for exactly the same man. 

Altair’s anger was completely and wholly unsafe. There was no room in his house that he could store it away from his children’s sight. There no conceivable benefit it could have for them. It simply could not exist so far as his children were concerned. And so, it simply never had.

All his parts were loose joints and murder, thinking of exactly what he wished to do to the man that had spoken to and about his children in such a way. To the person that had locked his sons in this tiny room like dogs and thought they would stay.

(All the saw was red, like a wet river, flowing slowly under his feet.) 

He’d called Walters to handle the Sheriff, the broken bike and the family that it had come from. He’d received word that the Father had been arrested for assaulting an officer. He heard that there were some less than savory words shouted in his son’s direction. Walters had asked if he would like to sue the man (and Altair would like to sue him, to take everything he owned just because he could) and Altair said they would have to make that determination in the morning. 

There was the matter of Mr. March that needed attending. 

More importantly, there was his son. Altair closed the window that had been left open and pulled closed the office door when he left. He picked up his bag that he’d left on the front stairs and went out to meet the car that had been waiting for him. When he was safely inside, he called Federico.

\--

Grandma’s house was made of comfortable things. She had soft sofas and carpets. She kept warm blankets and fluffy pillows all the time. No matter when they came or how long it had been since they saw her, she always had pajamas in their size to wear. She spoke just as soft, and hugged just as warmly, and made little boys with bruised feelings feel like nothing in the world couldn’t be conquered with a bit of hot tea.

When Jaida, Sef and Darim were all in bed (tucked upstairs into the guest rooms), Tazim crept back downstairs to find his Father lying on the couch in the living room. His phone was resting face-down on his chest while he watched Tazim creep down the stairs and he tucked it away when he sat up to make room. “Couldn’t sleep?” Father said.

“No,” he agreed. “Darim was snoring.” 

Father didn’t press him for more information that that, or ask him any more questions about the day. He was good about that, letting little boys who didn’t always know what they were thinking have space. Instead he said, “what to watch something?”

So they watched reruns on a kid’s channel, watching silly teenagers do silly things that always turned out okay. Tazim didn’t start off leaning against his Father’s arm but he ended up there, and then he must have slid because he was laying on a pillow pushed up against his Father’s thigh. And maybe he was more tired than he thought because he was getting woken up by the sound of the door being shut too hard.

“Sorry,” was Dad whispering in the dark. 

The TV was muted, the glare was too bright and too dull to see by all at once. Tazim twisted around from how he was laying on the couch and pushed himself up to squint at his Dad. School was full of boys who were too big for their age, that told tall stories and acted so tough, as if not a single one of them ever needed a hug. Dad picked him up to hug him and Tazim wrapped his arms as tight as he could around him. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I wasn’t lost. I was going to come back.”

“I love you,” was Dad’s answer as he hugged him. That wasn’t so bad, really. Then he let Tazim lay down again and sat on the floor by him so they could all three of them see the TV, and nobody said anything but Tazim fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP Mr. March, Mr. Brittany.


	5. Party Hard

Mrs. Ayers was, she liked to think, very humbly progressive. She made monthly contributions to several charities that supported at risk youth, homelessness, and LGBT+ causes. She had signed every online petition sent to her inbox that advocated for equal rights and equal protections under the law. She had two friends at the office that were in homosexual relationships and she had always felt perfectly at ease around them. 

There was no reason two men couldn’t raise a perfectly healthy family; there was no reason two women couldn’t live happily. There was no reason that it should matter to anyone else (at all) what gender a person identified as (except that they should care to make sure to use the right gender). 

Mrs. Ayers had even imagined how she might react if her daughter were to come out as lesbian or bisexual. She imagined the loving, sweet talks she might have with her child on the matter and how they would hold one another and cry. There was no reason to cry, of course, Mrs. Ayers knew that because she was very progressive. It was simply that these sorts of things always seemed to involve tearful confessions. (And when she thought about how her lovely daughter might want to become a lovely son, there was an undeniable sort of teariness involved.) 

She had busied herself with reading every book she could on the subject of supporting her child through any hiccups. When her husband had balked at the notion that their daughter might grow up to marry another woman, she had stern rebuked and calmly educated him on the matter. When her friends at the office were throwing tantrums about how their teenagers were ‘acting out’ by ‘making out with other girls, can you believe it’ or Sara Bee’s son had finally come out to her, Mrs. Ayers was already ready to offer advice and a sturdy shoulder to cry on.

Oh yes, Mrs. Ayers was very, terribly progressive.

In fact, her progressiveness often sent her charging through doors that were closed (but didn’t lock because in progressive families there were no secrets) before she could quite stop herself. Progressive had inertia in that way; it threw you forward into new and sometimes uncomfortable places but as long as you had a good attitude and the gumption to try, everything always worked out. 

It was progressiveness that pushed her through Aggie’s door. Mrs. Ayers was just tucking away a bit of laundry she finished up while her daughter was hosting a party downstairs. (And it was proof, of course, that she trusted her daughter so much that she’d allowed the party to be hosted. She hadn’t even been down once to be certain the soda had stayed soda and not been replaced by beer. It was just as well the kids would experiment with drinking at home where it was safe and not out in the streets where they could get into God-knows-what.) There she was, Progressive Mrs. Ayers, carrying a handful of her daughter’s freshly laundered panties, and there was her daughter stripped down to the panties sitting in some boy’s lap. 

Precious Aggie screamed, “ _Mom!_ ”

“Mom?” the boy repeated. He was levering himself up out of the pillows, leaning sideways to see her. 

All her friends said, all the time, oh you’re so progressive. You’re too permissive. I wish I could have a handle on everything like you. And Mrs. Ayers had a cheerful laugh to answer that with because progressiveness wasn’t difficult as long as you had an open mind.

“Take your hands off of my daughter!” Mrs. Ayers screamed, “what are you doing? Agatha Melissa Ayers, you put your shirt back on right this instant!” If she’d had a broom she might have been beating the boy with it. As she did not, she looked around for anything that would suffice and happened to get her fingertips across the tapped up edges of her daughter’s field hockey stick. 

“Oh, fu--” the boy shouted as he arched up on the bed. The force of the motion threw Aggie to the side and she landed on the floor with the boy scrambling to get past her. His socked feet were slick on the wood floor and he was somewhat burdened by how his pants were sliding off his skinny ass.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” Mrs. Ayers, the most progressive Mom in her group, screamed as she followed the boy out of the room.

\--

Darim’s life was (normally) relatively uncomplicated. It was just, at this very moment, as he fell into the corner at the top of while a hockey-stick wielding crazy person chasing him, that it had gotten considerably more difficult to comprehend. The edge bit into his ribs in a way that gave him flashbacks to tackle Tuesday. His pants were halfway to his knees (and not at all in the way he’d thought they’d be by now) so he was trying to drag them up and go down the stairs at the same time. 

Basically, he was doomed to fail. He made it two steps before his feet failed him and he tucked in everything he could as he hit the steps in a roll. There was nothing especially good about falling down stairs but Tazim and him had made a game out of it when they were pretty young. Father had told them it would lead to paralysis but Dad had taught them how to do it successfully. 

When he hit the bottom, all the air in his lungs was kicked straight out. His head was spinning like a top, with neon lights and ringing bells knocking around the inside of his skull. It took a little push to get himself flat on his back so he could get up. That delay gave the horror movie villain following him time to catch up. 

There was an assortment of startled gasps and shouts as Darim dipped backward to keep from being hit by the hockey stick. He stepped on his pant leg and they lost the battle of gravity, sliding all the way to the floor. 

“Hey!” sounded a great deal like his sister. She slid under the next wave of the wildly swinging hockey stick and grabbed it just above where the woman was holding it and when Jaida pulled, she pulled like a full-grown ox. (A fact that had been proven yearly as she single handedly won every game of tug of war ever.) “What are you doing?” Jaida shouted.

Darim took that moment of quiet to duck down and pick up his pants. He didn’t waste too much time being precious about how he was naked to his undershorts because the situation seemed far too volatile to worry about little details. One of the other girls (with pretty breasts under her artfully distressed pink shirt) was open-mouthed staring at him. And if a girl gaped at your package, it was simply good manners to wink back. 

“That boy was groping my daughter!” the woman screamed. “He tricked her! He pressured her! My baby wouldn’t have let some _man_ paw her like that.”

Jaida didn’t loosen her grip on the hockey stick (because it was a weapon) but shift her grip so she was holding it one handed at her side. She half turned to motion at him, “he’s _thirteen_ ,” as if that were synonymous with _incapable_. Jaida scoffed in disgust and shook her head, “Aggie is fifteen.” 

The crazy woman didn’t seem to understand this information, but all the teenagers behind them were snickering. “Everyone get out!” the woman shouted, “get out! Get out now! I’m calling all your parents.”

Darim leaned forward to tap on Jaida’s shoulder, “maybe we should go,” he said. Maybe he shouldn’t because she turned around with a flat-frown and a hockey stick gripped tight in one hand. “It was her idea!” 

“Boys!” Jaida screamed right at his face. She threw the hockey stick on the floor and joined the exodus of teenagers going out the front door. There was a dozen or two of them at least, one after the other turning on their phones to call for rides.

Aggie was halfway down the stairs, halfway in her clothes, looking like she’d been crying the whole time. But it wasn’t heartbreak that she screamed at her Mom. It was grown-up fury to discover the empty space where party had been. She was furious when she shouted, “ _why did you do that?_ Why did you embarrass me like that? Why are you _always_ like this?”

Darim’s shoes were upstairs but there was no getting on the stairs around the banshee shrieking. He crept out the open front door between, _I’m calling your father_ and _you ruin everything; everyone is laughing at me_. 

“Creep,” one girl hissed at him on the sidewalk. But he walked past two boys that gave him a high-five. While it was always nice to get the approval of random high school boys, it didn’t really give him shoes or tell him where his sister went.

\--

It took ten minutes of jogging to catch up to Jaida that didn’t seem to care that they were at least ten miles from home and it was _dark_ out. The air was taking on that early-spring chill and the sidewalks were damp from an earlier rain. None of that seemed to matter to her as she walked like she meant to murder a man. Her arms were crossed over her chest in a way that couldn’t be doing anything to combat the chill.

“Hey!” he shouted, “what are you doing? Dad would kill me if he knew you were out here alone.”

Jaida laughed like, “Ha. ha. Ha,” but there was no joke.

“I didn’t force her!” Darim shouted. “She came onto me.”

That made his sister spin and nothing good had ever come out of making Jaida spin around. Her skirt flew up around her knees as her arms came untucked from her chest and she shoved him back a step. “This was my party!” she shouted at him. “ _Mine_. I let you come because you begged me to and you _promised_ that you wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me.”

“She came onto me!” Darim shouted again. “What guy turns that down?”

Jaida could not fathom an answer to that question. (Or else she couldn’t fathom a question so stupid.) Her hands flew up into the air and she made a noise that wasn’t a word. When she turned back around, she didn’t seem to care that he didn’t immediately follow her. 

“You can’t walk alone!” Darim shouted after her. “Dad said!”

Jaida turned around so she was walking backward and enunciated (very carefully), “if you follow me, I’ll kick your ass.” Then she spun back around and kept walking.

So there he was, with no shoes and no jacket and no phone (because it was up in his coat), feeling very much blamed for things that weren’t his fault. This was exactly the complicated situation that he spent most of his time avoiding; this was precisely the sort of shit that Sef was always getting himself wrapped up in.

There were two very simple choices: he could go back to Aggie’s house and ask to use a phone and hope that Aggie’s Father had more sense than Aggie’s Mother (and also hope that Dad answered when they called to tell on him) or he could run after Jaida and get his ass kicked but, at very least, not leave her out after dark by herself.

They were two very simple choices. Yet, there he stood, unable to pick the right one.

\--

Jaida had never hated her brothers; but they made it harder every single year they were alive. Father liked to tell them all that as a family, it was important to protect one another. Dad just wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair and told her that he was proud of her when she stood up for the idiots. 

High school was supposed to be her chance to get rid of them, all three of them, trailing after her like lemmings. She’d mounted a three month essay campaign to convince her parents to let her transfer out of the school they were zoned for because she did not want to spend another four years carrying around ‘oh so you’re the triplet’s sister?’ The very thought of ‘why do you have a different last name’ made her want to snap necks. 

“Jaida!” was the sound of a stupid dead boy padding across pavement. “Are you really going to walk?” There was no point in answering that. As dim as Darim could be (and he could be _dim_ when the occasion called for it) he was smart enough to figure things out as they happened. She was wearing heels and outpacing him with ease because he was jogging on cold, wet pavement in socks. “Jaida, come on. You can’t just not talk to me. I didn’t start it with her! We were talking about football and cheerleaders and she said that she wanted to be a cheerleader but her Mom made her play field hockey. I said that she looked just like a cheerleader and she asked me about what I played so--”

“So you took your pants off?” Jaida screamed. A dog started barking immediately after so she didn’t stop moving to shout at him more.

“ _No_. She said she had all these medals and I said that I’d love to see them. I didn’t know that was girl code for take your pants off!” He was jogging again, hissing when his feet ran across sticks on the pavement. He pitched forward when he missed his next step and she caught him before he hit the pavement. “I didn’t know she wanted to have sex,” he said. 

The real trouble was that Darim couldn’t lie to save his life. Sef could manage it if he had to; at very least he could recount events in imperfect order to make it seem like he was innocent. Tazim could have followed Maria into acting as good as he was at lying. 

Jaida sighed. “How do you not know?”

“Why would I know?” he demanded back. “I’ve never had sex! Half the girls at my school think kissing is sin. Can you imagine Miley Sniper taking her shirt off? I can’t.” That was important because Darim had fallen hard for Miley Sniper back in second grade and she’d always been just beyond his reach. Maybe he’d gotten over it eventually but, first love was the hardest, and no other girl was as ideal as Miley Sniper had been.

“You promised me.”

“I know!” Darim said, very fast while he danced back and forth on his feet in front of her. “I didn’t know that she was going to take her shirt off and then she did and it was just _boobs_.” 

Darim had clearly been unprepared to face a foe as dastardly as boobs. Jaida closed her eyes and tried to breath through the anger. She was making pretty good headway toward thinking through the problem and arriving at a nonviolent solution when her precious little brother whimpered,

“Do you have your phone? Can we call Dad? It’s cold.”

Jaida smiled even before she opened her eyes, and when she looked at him Darim was smart enough to look frightened. “We’ll call Father,” she said.

“Dad’s home,” Darim whispered.

“Yes he is,” she agreed. “But you tried to stick your dick in one of the most popular girls in the sophomore class while I was trying to advance my social standing. I’m a freshman from a different district, I have no advantage.”

“I didn’t try to! She was the one that was groping me.” 

Jaida pulled her phone out of her purse and held it up. “We call Father or we walk.” It was a dangerous gamble because all it required was Darim to know that Dad would have grounded her for making him walk ten miles in the cold with no shoes on just out of spite. The three idiots acted like nobody could figure out the genetics when Dad couldn’t control that little wild glint in his eye any time his biological sons got a cold. 

Tazim had strep throat three times in a row and Dad had weathered it with popsicles and smiles. Darim got a sinus infection once and he went to three specialists in less than two weeks. (God help them if skinny little Sef ever got anything more impressive than a seasonal allergy.) 

Darim wavered, shifting from one foot to the other, trying not to keep either foot on the ground for too long. “Fine,” he gasped, “fine we’ll call Father.”

\--

Jaida made them walk up to the corner. They were loitering around an all-night cash advance (in this neighborhood) while they waited for Father. It wasn’t exactly the location that he would have chosen but his sister was born without fear. She kicked off her shoes when they finally stopped walking and said, “put them on.”

“Because you’re mad at me?” he asked.

“Because your feet are cold, moron.” She wasn’t even wearing socks but the grim frown on her face had no time to worry over silly things like cold feet. “I won’t tell anyone,” she promised.

Darim slid his feet into her heels. The wet socks weren’t much better off the ground but at least he couldn’t feel the pebbles that felt like knives. He watched her rub the backs of her arms and pulled open the buttons of his shirt. “Here,” he said when he got it loose enough to pull it over his head. 

“You idiot,” she said. But she took the shirt, slipping it on over her head and sighing with relief. The garish overhead light made her pink lips look purple and hollowed out the space under her eyes so they were black pits. “Did she actually hit you with that stick?”

“No,” Darim said. That didn’t stop Jaida from poking at his ribs and his arms, peering through the sheer white of his undershirt to look for bruises. “I’m fine,” he said. “At least until Father gets here.”

She smiled about that. “You ruined my night.”

“I didn’t know what she wanted!” At least, he hadn’t known until she pushed him against the dresser and put her tongue in his mouth. At that point it had seemed rude to turn her down so he had done his best to play along. And oh boy, by the time she took her shirt off it had just felt like there was nothing on earth more important. “You should have brought Sef and none of this would have happened,” he said.

That made Jaida snort. “Leave him alone,” but it was a fond and empty command. It didn’t matter to him (or to her) what Sef grew up to be but watching him trying to work out whether or not he wanted to kiss girls had become a bit like watching a trainwreck in motion. They all knew that Sef didn’t care one way or another about sports of any kind and even less about football specifically but that didn’t stop him from showing up to every practice waiting to see buff boys in tight shirts tackling one another. 

A car pulled into the parking lot and Darim stepped up closer to Jaida, “is that Father?”

“Well, if it’s not I know how to sever a jugular with a heel.” (There was no telling if she were joking or not either.) But the car came to a stop and Father got out of the (wrong side) passenger side as Dad rolled down the driver side window and the two of their parents were looking at them. “Oh good,” Jaida said with a smile, “they’re both here.”

\--

Malik had done an exemplary job at not blowing up in the car. He’d managed to listen to all the details while he just nodded along and when the tale was finished, he had only said: 

“I wish you had called sooner,” which just meant there was a great well of things he wasn’t saying.

At the house, Jaida stomped upstairs but Darim lingered. He sat on the steps and peeled his socks off, watching Malik come in the house and indecisively pace in the front room. Altair wasn’t inclined to make many judgments about sex as long as everyone was willing and smart about it but he didn’t like the notion that his thirteen year old son had stumbled across the living reality of it so soon. He might have said something about how Darim was too young but even that seemed like it would be lighting the fuse on a conversation Malik wasn’t prepared to have yet.

“Go take a shower,” Altair said. Darim didn’t question his good luck but turn to run like his life depended on it. “A _hot_ shower!”

As soon as they were alone, Malik pointed up the stairs like it was all he needed to say.

“I would love to go back to our bedroom, you read my mind,” Altair said. “Weren’t you saying something about--”

“They’re listening,” Malik said sharply. 

“We were having sex!” Altair shouted up the stairs. “We would like to have finished having sex but we were interrupted!” It always delighted him how quickly things like that made his children scatter. They weren’t nearly young enough to still be listening at the top of the stairs but it didn’t seem to stop them. “Fully naked sex!”

Malik wasn’t amused. (He never was.) “He’s thirteen.”

“I knew what sex was at thirteen,” Altair said. He went down the hall to the kitchen because this seemed like a kitchen conversation. At very least he was going to need a snack to make it through, so he was going through the fridge when Malik leaned against the counters behind him. 

“I don’t remember you having sex at thirteen,” Malik said.

“Ezio said I was a late bloomer.” Altair sorted through a week’s worth of leftovers before he found a yogurt tucked into the door that hadn’t expired. He wasn’t generally a fan of yogurt but it was easier than heating something up. “I didn’t say I was having sex, I said I knew what it was. Thanks to Ezio and Federico, I had a very graphic understanding of it.”

Malik was glaring at him. 

Altair peeled the lid off the yogurt and threw it in the trash. “We agreed not to raise our kids to be ashamed of sex. I’m not thrilled with the idea that he’s thirteen and he already came this close. The last thing I want any of our kids to have is infants and sexual transmitted infections.”

“I don’t want him ashamed of sex,” Malik said.

In a perfect world, where Malik was capable of understanding himself as well as he understood everything else, nobody would have had to point out that his husband, amazing though he was, had never evolved past the point wherein he viewed sex with some degree of shame. Malik was delightfully sexual now; they’d always enjoyed a perfect compatibility in that way. Still, that notion that sex was more significant than it was nagged at him. While Malik stagnated on his view of sex, Altair had learned not to start fights that would keep him from getting laid. “I know, I meant, how are we going to approach this without adding shame to it?”

If anything, Malik seemed impressed by his agility at getting through a minefield. “Why didn’t you have sex young?”

“I was fat and distracted by how I was trying to make Mama Maria hate me,” he pulled a spoon out of the drawer and leaned back against the fridge. “Darim is charming, athletic and everyone knows he’s filthy rich. The kid’s going to be tripping over girls trying to be his girlfriend.”

Malik scowled. “We should give him condoms.”

That did not seem like the logical step to convincing their son not to have sex. Altair cocked up an eyebrow while he licked the yogurt off the spoon. 

“We sit him down and we explain to him that sex has risks. He could get infections or he could impregnate a girl. To lower his risk of either he needs to be prepared and have condoms.”

That wasn’t such a bad idea. He could almost picture Darim’s precious face, slack with embarrassment, having to accept condoms from his Father. Malik had a way of making even good ideas seem like bad ones (which was frustrating). Altair nodded, “you should do it.”

“Why me?”

“You’ll make it seem scarier than I could.” He finished the last of the yogurt and dropped the spoon into the dishwasher. He stepped forward so he was crowded up into Malik’s space, slid his arms around his back and pressed up against him slowly-but-surely so he had plenty of time to make it known he didn’t want to be touched. “Now about what you were saying upstairs.”

“That moment’s gone,” Malik assured him.

Altair kissed him, “we can make another one.”


	6. Virginia?

Deputy Hodge had been on the force for at least sixteen years. While fate had saw fit to give him a runny nose and a red face, it hadn’t seen fit to give him any children. It was just as well because his wife said she’d rather have beagles than children. (The Hodge Beagles were very popular for their impressive bark and their extraordinary cuteness.) The station was half filled with family men and women, and of those half there were at least four or five kids that had made it their personal mission to make their parents lives hell. 

It wasn’t the kids’ fault. The only benefit of having dogs instead of kids was that, while Deputy Harrister and Sheriff Hollandaise (so they called him) couldn’t help but search for some deficit in their child, Deputy Hodge knew that kids were just kids and not a single one of them had been born a devil. Parents had a way of raising little demons and being surprised when the demon bit them. 

As Deputy Hodge’s Mother liked to say, ‘you will reap what you sow.’

He liked to remember that when faced with calls like this one. Deputy Harrister would have taken a glance at these three almost-adults and seen grown men with weapons and bloody faces; he would have seen hooligans (as he liked to say) and definite criminals. Deputy Harrister was real fond of dragging anyone in that could be dragged in, preaching some nonsense about quotas and ‘real life lessons’ when (so far as Deputy Hodge was concerned) no kid had ever learned anything from being put in a jail cell except how to be afraid of a police officer.

“Whoa, whoa,” Deputy Hodge said to the kid with the tire iron that seemed, to the untrained eyed, like he was very likely to start beating the kid kneeling by the car tire any second. “What’s all this?” he asked. 

The boy at the back had the darkest hair and the least trustworthy face. He was leaning against the car heedless of how it was going to shove the car off the jack, rubbing his bloody nose on his fist. That didn’t seem to be doing a thing to stop bleeding but it was making a big scary mess. 

The boy with the tire iron let it down slowly in time with the skinny one that had been kneeling getting to his feet. One of them had a swelling knot on his head, the other one had bloody pink teeth when he smiled. Not a single one of them looked like they were about to tell him the truth. 

“We got a flat tire,” the skinny one said.

“I see,” Deputy Hodge agreed. They had, in fact, two flat tires. He said, politely, “could you please go ahead and set that tire iron on the ground?”

“Yeah,” was agreeable enough. 

“Now, Ms. Bertie across the way there,” he pointed over his shoulder at the little yellow house on the other side of the two lane highway, “she gave us a call because she saw the three of you fighting on the road.”

“We were just fighting each other,” the thicker one said. “We settled it.”

“We’re very sorry if we upset her,” the skinny one added.

“That’s very kind of you,” Deputy Hodge agreed, “however, we got a call from the gas station up the road that alleges he saw three out of town boys come into the store and help themselves to some alcohol.”

And that made two of the three boys look instantly guilty. It was funny how much like a man a boy could feel until he got caught with his fists full of cookies. The heavier boy was making a show of being aghast, the skinny one was glancing guiltily at the backseat of the car. But the boy leaning against the trunk had bled all over both of his fists and was still going, he spit out, “son of a bitch, I think you broke my nose!” 

Deputy Hodge didn’t have to ask them if he could search the car, two out of the three of the boys were all set to confess their sins. It wasn’t such a big deal, a couple of idiots thinking they could get away with something. If he’d had kids, they probably would have done the same thing. All three of them were wearing some kind of band T-shirt and it didn’t take a great feat of detectiving to figure out they must have been on their way through. A few beers seemed like just the thing for a roadtrip to see a concert. “Now, young men. I’d like to help you. So why don’t we just go back to the station. We’ll get some towels for the nose bleed and we’ll call your parents. I’m sure we can sort the whole thing out as long as you’ve still got the beer.”

And unlike Sheriff Hollandaise who liked to trick boys like this and then lock them in the drunk tank with men far older and with far fewer morals to (teach them a lesson they won’t forget), Deputy Hodge generally meant what he said.

The skinny one looked at the thicker one who made a face. There was unspoken communication happening there and then the boy at the end shouted, “fuck!” and squeezing his nose shut as hard as he could. 

“Fine,” the bigger one said.

The skinny one opened the back door and dragged out the stolen beer which he held out with the most painful regret possible. “He might need a doctor,” he said.

“We’ll see about that after we take this back,” Deputy Hodge said. He opened the backseat of his patrol car and motioned them toward it. “I’ll call a tow truck for the car too.” He didn’t laugh until all three of the guilty boys were crammed in the backseat and when he did laugh, he didn’t do it with any meanness. It was just the sort of laugh you got when you find yourself apprehending the worst amatuer criminals since little Georgia Peach Miranda had tried shoving a piglet under her dress at the county fair.

He got in the front seat and pulled a handful of tissues out of the can that was wedged in the center console. He poked them in through the holes in the plexiglass divider so the bleeding kid had something to catch the flow. “Where’s the concert?” he asked. And he laughed all over again when they started asking him how he knew where they were going.

\--

Altair’s cell rang first but he didn’t recognize the number so it went to voicemail and he meant to listen to that but he was reading a pile of memos that he’d been putting off for about three months. (Some of them, like reminders about office parties, were no longer relevant.) The office phone rang and his assistant answered it, sounded vaguely annoyed by who it was and then buzzed in to say,

“Sir, it’s your son on line one.”

Altair picked it up and said, “hello son,” while he skimmed through a passive aggressive memo regarding the amount of pens that had gone missing on the third floor. (There had been one about fish and microwaves that he wanted to frame and hang in the office in between the fancy diplomas.) 

“Dad!” was Darim, sounding very casual and not at all as if he were about to admit to having done something stupid, illegal or ill-advised. 

“Son!” he answered.

“So, Dad,” Darim started again. “We haven’t been arrested,” well that was always a great start to any conversation. Altair hummed that he was still listening (and that he didn’t believe Darim at all) so his son would proceed with, “but we are at the station. Deputy Hodge said that he’d be willing to let us off with a warning, he just needs to release us into the custody of a parent or responsible adult.”

“Mm,” Altair said. “What station are you at?”

Darim mumbled a string of syllables that was too slurred and rushed to be anything approaching words.

“I’m sorry?”

“Northville Central,” Darim repeated with great care.

Altair dropped the memo and leaned back into his chair. While he hadn’t memorized the entire state of New York’s many, many, many police stations he had a decent grasp of all of the ones where his children were most likely to be taken if arrested. “Where is that?” he asked.

The answer was dead silence. They had arrived, very quickly, at the true crux of the problem. Wherever his sons were, they were not supposed to be there. He was working out how far they might have gotten--it was two in the afternoon and they had left before seven that morning to go to school. Clearly, wherever they had gone, they had not gone to school. 

“Darim,” he said, “what state are you in?”

“Virginia?”

Altair closed his eyes. He thought very carefully about what he wanted to say and when nothing but a long string of blanks and questions marks emerged from his brain he leaned forward again to push his elbows against the top of his desk. “Virginia,” he repeated with a great deal more conviction than Darim had used.

“We didn’t really do anything though, Dad. I mean we did take the beers but we gave them back so Deputy Hodge said that we could get away with a warning we just need someone to come and get us--”

“How did you get to Virginia?” Altair didn’t even need to hear the answer.

“...The car,” Darim whispered.

Altair dragged a breath into his lungs and considered what Malik would do in this situation. They’d already covered a variety of situations in their career as parents. Malik had managed to get saddled with the joy of being the first responder to kidnappings, jewelry heists, breaking and entering and a variety of lesser crimes. He always maintained a calm that was mind boggling when one considered how angry he must have been on the inside. Altair couldn’t have cared less about petty theft (except that it was stupid, and his sons were far too rich to steal things) or, really, about the fact that his teenage sons had lied about going to school and left the state instead. Those were things, he felt, that were all to be expected. 

Altair had been a certified adult at sixteen, all alone in a penthouse with a blank check and no direction and he’d emerged perfectly fine. (As far as he was concerned; Malik’s opinion was another matter entirely.)

No, what Altair cared about was, “do you realize that it took me a year to convince your Father to let me buy you that car? I had to convince him you were responsible, that you were trustworthy. I had to argue him up from buying you a car from _2021_ because he felt you were just teenagers and you would wreck any vehicle we gave you. I had to research every car on the market for resale value because he felt it was only a matter of time before you would fuck up and we would have to sell it.”

“Well that’s not fair,” Darim said.

“No! It wasn’t fair. I told him that. I told him that if we wanted our children to behave as responsible adults we had to treat them as if they were. I made him feel guilty about doubting you. And what did you do, son? What did you do?”

“There was a concert!”

“You proved him right. He said, if you get them a car they’ll do something stupid with it. He said, make them pay for it themselves. He said, they already enjoy too many privileges.” Altair wasn’t sighing but he was thinking about sighing.

“But, _Dad_ ,” Darim whined.

“Now I have to go and tell your Father, my Husband, Malik Al-Sayf, the king of Gloating and Being Constantly Right that our sons have been not arrested in Virginia for kind of stealing beer on their way to a concert when they should have been in school.” 

“We totaled the car,” Darim said like he hadn’t planned on mentioning at all. “I don’t know what happened but two of the wheels exploded and Deputy Hodge says that the mechanic said we bent the axle? So it’s probably not worth fixing.”

Altair was pinching his nose like he could rip it off his face. “Anything else?”

“Sef probably broke Tazim’s nose with the spare tire,” Darim admitted.

“I’m hanging up,” he said.

“Dad!” Darim shouted. “Come on, Dad. Can’t you just talk to Deputy Hodge? I know you’re disappointed.”

“I’m not,” Altair disagreed. “I’m just going to go and enjoy what little time I have left with my husband before he finds out he was right.”

“That’s not fair,” Darim said again. “We didn’t mean to do it.”

“You can’t accidentally drive to Virginia, son. Just do me a favor and don’t call your Father. I’d like to get laid one more time before he starts his victory lap. You know how he gets.”

“Dad!” 

“Call the lawyers, son. Or your sister. Good luck. Out of all my sons, you three were my favorites.” 

It sounded like Darim was going to say ‘Dad’ again but Altair hung up the phone and picked up his suit jacket as he headed toward the door. His assistant looked up with a confused stare and a quick glance at his watch (which didn’t show that it was quitting time). “Is everything alright?”

“Everything’s great,” Altair said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

\--

Darim looked across the desk at Deputy Hodge who was grinning so hard his whole face had gone red. He was eating carrots out of dish that had beagle pups printed on it, and sitting next to him in a wooden chair was Tazim with an ice pack on his face. Sef was to Darim’s left looking _horrified_ about everything he’d just heard. 

“He just hung up,” Darim whispered. “He just--he just said--he just _hung up_.”

“Father wouldn’t have hung up,” Tazim said (or else it was what it sounded like he said behind the ice pack). 

“He can’t hang up!” Sef shouted. He was no good in high-stress situations. While he’d been completely on board with driving several states to see the concert (that they’d missed when it was much closer) in theory, his mental breakdown had started as soon as they crossed the state line. Everything else was a slow-mounting hysteria. 

“Where exactly are you boys from?” Deputy Hodge asked.

“Could we make another phone call?” Tazim asked rather than answer. 

“We can’t call Father,” Darim hissed. Tazim was too far away to have heard Dad go on about how Father would gloat (and he would) and all about how Dad had just left them here in this situation so he could go have sex with Father. Sef had heard it though. He was shaking his head in disgust. “We could call Jaida?”

“Jaida would tell them to put us in jail,” Tazim said.

“Who's Jaida?” the deputy asked.

“Our sister,” was their simultaneous answer. 

The deputy nodded solemnly, “older?” 

They all nodded together. Tazim considered it a moment; it had been his idea to steal the beer anyway. He got all caught up in ideas like that, just to see if he could. He pulled the ice pack away from his face to say, “call the scary lawyer lady. Give me the phone, I know her number.”

The deputy pulled a package of apple slices out of his lunch box and offered them around. Sef looked offended by being offered food by an authority figure but Darim took one because he was hungry. Tazim shook his head and mumbled something about his mouth tasting like copper.

“You boys going to have enough money to get a hotel room for the night?”

Darim glanced at Sef who just nodded.

“Been saving up all your allowance for this trip?” the deputy asked.

“Yeah,” Darim agreed. He ate his apple slice while Tazim went through the basics with the lawyer. “So, you like beagles?”

The deputy shrugged. “My wife loves them; I love my wife.”

“No,” Tazim said with as much impatience as he could manage through his swollen face. “I haven’t been denied access to medical care. Look, Deputy Hodge has been really nice. We just have to have a responsible adult come pick us up. Dad said he wasn’t going to do it.” Then he was quiet a minute. Then he nodded. Then he looked at the deputy with narrow eyes and something that might have been a nice smile, and then he said, “I don’t know what you just said. Do you want to talk to him?”

Deputy Hodge looked very amused when he reached out to take the phone. It was kind of like watching that part of the dog movie where the idiot mutt happily walked to his inevitable death. Tazim was right about how Deputy Hodge was alright so Darim lurched forward across the table to grab the phone.

“Ms. Ferdinand, it’s Darim. He really is a great guy. He even told the Sheriff that he didn’t see any reason to arrest us and he could have just done it.”

Ms. Ferdinand might have been incapable of being shocked (or being happy) because she just hummed like she was jotting that down, “yes, thank you Mr. Ibn-La’Ahad. I promise that I will be gentle. When you are released, I will call and direct you to the nearest qualified emergency room. Please hand the phone to Deputy Hodge.”

Darim said, “you promise?”

“I promise.”

And since she promised (twice), he held the phone out to Deputy Hodge who seemed ever so slightly spooked in comparison to how amused he’d been before. 

Sef leaned in against Darim’s shoulder, “you know she’s going to investigate the Sheriff now, don’t you?”

Darim smiled. It was better if he didn’t admit to anything outright or else his brothers might think he’d developed brains. It was nice being the dim one; he planned to stay that way as long as he could manage. 

\--

Malik wasn’t expecting Altair home for several hours after he showed up. He’d been in the middle of crying over his student’s essays when his husband grabbed the back of his computer chair and pulled him back and spun him around. Malik would never, _ever_ admit to having purchased the chair based entirely on how it could easily fit and support both of them (but that’s what he did). Altair dragged Malik’s hips forward before he sat in his lap and smiled at him.

“Hi,” Malik said.

“Hi,” Altair said back. 

Everything about this was suspicious. Altair kissing him like this almost always meant that he was racing to beat a clock. The open office door and the fact that Altair had already taken off his shoes, socks, belt and tie meant that the nature of the thing he was racing was somewhat urgent. While Malik knew all this, he also knew that Altair was never so dedicated to truly impressive sex as he was in situations like this. 

“Good day at work?” he asked. His head tipped back because Altair’s fingers were spread through his hair. He thought about adding something but suddenly his neck was being kissed. Directly after his shirt was being unbuttoned. While he wasn’t as instantly distractible now as he had been when they were first married; he understood the importance of really good sex much better. “Fuck it,” he mumbled to himself (when some part of him was making a valiant effort to remind the rest of him that There Was A Secret). 

“What?” Altair asked.

“Bed,” Malik said like he was repeating it, “I like beds.”

Altair’s smile was just so, _damned_ pleased.

\--

In the end, the deputy let them go with a ‘be good boys’ as he waved from the front of the police station. They retrieved their stuff from the totaled car (that Ms. Ferdinand said they would address in the morning) and went to spend the entire night in the emergency room.

\--

Tazim was discharged from the ER somewhere around three in the morning. Sef had fallen asleep three times while they waited and Darim had spent most of the time watching Tazim watch TV while he spun his keys around on his finger and thought about how truly insufferable Father would be. It was an unspoken contest among the four of them (all three boys and Dad) to try very hard never to prove Father right. 

It wasn’t fair that he was right about this because they could have made it to the concert and back. He didn’t even know what had happened to the wheels. By the time they ended up outside, standing just under the overhang of the hospital, looking miserably out at the drizzling rain, Darim had reached a point of exhaustion in which the only logical conclusion to any problem was to give up.

“Did the lawyer get us a hotel room?” Tazim asked.

“I don’t think so,” Darim said.

Sef yawned and yawned. “We could probably find a hotel. Don’t they usually have hotels around hospitals?” 

“I don’t care,” Darim said. And both his brothers just rolled their eyes. 

“We gotta get him a bed,” Tazim said. Sef nodded with great exaggeration.

\--

The morning came faster than was entirely necessary. He was shaken awake by his phone buzzing and screaming. When he forced his eyes to open and his fumbling hands to find it lost between the covers he discovered it was Father calling him. He answered it with, “morning.”

“At last,” Father said (in a very well-rested voice), “one of you answers.” There was possibly more to that lecture but he said, “are you alright,” before he said anything else.

“Yeah,” Darim said. He listed off their various minor wounds and Tazim’s not-actually-but-almost-broken nose. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched his two idiot brothers sleeping the wrong way on the second bed. Neither of them had a blanket but both of them were sleeping soundly despite it. “I don’t know how to get back home,” he said.

“I suggest a plane,” Father said. “Would you like me to check flights for you?”

Darim rubbed his sore eyes and shrugged, “yeah. I just have my phone and I know I don’t have enough in the bank for a plane ticket.”

Father made an agreeing sound. “Go down to the front desk and ask if you can stay another night in the hotel room, then go back to sleep. I’ll call you in a few hours with the flight information.”

“Thanks,” Darim mumbled. 

“Don’t fall asleep,” Father said even if he weren’t there to see Darim wilting back toward the bed. “You need to go reserve the room for another night. Take your wallet with you so you can pay for it.” 

Darim groaned in objection but dragged himself up to his feet, “fine, I’m going.” Somehow, he made it all the way down the hall and all the way through securing the room for a second night and all the way back without falling over.

\--

Sef woke him up at two in the afternoon, looking refreshed, to say, “Father got us a flight. Come on. We’re going to get something to eat before we go.” 

“This is why you call Father,” Tazim was saying as he pulled his shoes on. “Father gets shit done.”


End file.
